Michael Hart
Michael S. Hart was an American author and pioneer who invented the e-book and founded Project Gutenberg, the world's first digital library of free public domain works.
- Lived
- 1947–2011
- Nationality
- American
Michael Stern Hart was an American author and technology pioneer widely credited with inventing the electronic book. In 1971, Hart founded Project Gutenberg, the oldest digital library, with the mission to make literature freely available to anyone via digital means. He began by publishing e-books via ARPANET years before the modern internet existed, later expanding distribution to bulletin board systems (BBS) and Gopher servers.
Hart dedicated his life to digitizing and distributing literature from works in the public domain with free or expired copyrights. In the early years of the project, he personally typed most of the e-books into plain text files to ensure they could be read on any computer platform. As the initiative grew, a global network of volunteers joined the effort, helping to expand the catalog and transition the texts into various modern formats.
Hart's revolutionary vision of democratic access to literature established a lasting legacy. His work not only pioneered the e-book industry but also laid the groundwork for modern open-access digital archiving and electronic publishing initiatives worldwide.
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