Subject: Free chapter added to saga of e-books
Date: Fri, 2 Jun 2006 08:50:12 -0400
From: Walter Kwami <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Reply-To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
The developing world could really benefit from this free e-books project...
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Free chapter added to saga of e-books
By David Mehegan, Globe Staff | June 2, 2006
For much of the past decade, the publishing world has been trying to figure
out how to make money selling books in electronic form. Now a private
project wants to give e-books away for free.
Project Gutenberg, a 35-year-old nonprofit based in Urbana, Ill., announced
yesterday it is putting as many as 300,000 books online, where they will be
available for free download. Called the World eBook Fair
(worldbookfair.com), the program will last a month -- July 4 to Aug. 4 --
and will be repeated annually.
The catalog of available works will include fiction, nonfiction, and
reference books, mostly those that are no longer protected by copyright.
``It will include the oldest books in the world, including every author you
have heard of in your life, other than current ones," said Michael Hart,
Project Gutenberg's founder. The fair also will offer classical music files,
both scores and recordings, as well as films.
About 95 percent of the books are in the public domain and not subject to
copyright law, Hart said. The copyright holders of the remaining 5 percent
have given permission for use of their works. Copyright law generally
protects a work for 70 years beyond the death of its creator.
Roughly 20,000 of the books have been scanned by thousands of Gutenberg
volunteers -- and are already available at gutenberg.org -- but the majority
will be loaned to Gutenberg for the month by more than 100 e-book libraries,
including the World eBook Library, which normally charges a fee for
temporary access. As many as 100,000 of the 300,000 books will remain
available permanently. Gutenberg plans to offer 500,000 books in next year's
fair, 750,000 in 2008, and 1 million in 2009. Still, even these numbers are
a fraction of the tens of millions of books that have been published
throughout history.
``Our stuff is all free," Hart said. ``We want people to take these books
and use them, to keep them in their PDAs. Our mission is to help break down
the walls of ignorance and illiteracy."
Efforts to establish a commercial e-book marketplace have stumbled. Attempts
to sell hand-held readers failed because they were clumsy and delicate,
downloadable books were few, and fees were high. Google recently announced a
plan to make millions of books searchable online, but the company has faced
opposition from publishers outraged over potential copyright infringement.
Attempts to reach publishers and booksellers last night were unsuccessful.
In the World eBook Fair, the books can be downloaded and read on almost any
kind of computer -- even a cellphone or PDA . The idea is not merely to lend
or rent access to the book but to give it away so that it can be kept in a
library, copied, or shared with friends.
Hart said the major flaw with previous attempts to sell e-books was the
device. ``Those readers were dinosaurs before they were born," he said.
``This generation grew up on Game Boy. The screen of a cellphone is fine for
them. The iPod had been out only a week when someone wrote a program so you
could read our books on it."
Hart, 58, has been the dedicated visionary behind the project since its
inception in 1971, working out of his basement in Urbana since graduating
from the University of Illinois. In a phone interview, he spoke in
evangelistic tones about the social virtue of the project. ``We want to
increase literacy and education from the bottom up," he said. ``I think of
this as a blue-collar project. Our target is not the erudite professor of
Shakespeare -- it's everybody, as many people as we can encourage to read."
Gutenberg volunteers -- who have been typing and scanning books into
computers for 35 years, well before anyone had heard of the Internet -- have
the passion of Wikipedians. ``I have 40,000 people to help," Hart said.
``There are no universities or corporations involved, just a lot of people
in attics banging on their computers. We have one workaholic insomniac who
has scanned 2,500 to 3,000 books by himself. He buys them, scans them, and
proofreads them."
Though Hart is the project's conceptual force, the unpaid CEO of Project
Gutenberg is Gregory Newby, acting chief scientist of the Arctic Area
Supercomputing Center at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. While more
low-key than Hart on the phone, he was no less fired with conviction.
``As we see it, if e-books are to succeed, readers have to be allowed to do
everything they can do with a real book," Newby said. ``If you use Google
Book Search, you can search text, but after a few pages you can't read any
more. If you try to use it like a book, you encounter a lot of barriers."
Newby said he sees free e-books as the way of the future for classic works.
``It breaks my heart to go into Barnes & Noble and find Jane Austen for sale
in a trade format," he said. ``Where does that money go? It's close to
profiteering. No author is getting any money for it. I feel sorry for
schools, where kids are now reading Canterbury Tales or Huckleberry Finn,
and the schools are spending millions of dollars from their budgets to buy
the books. We're giving the stuff away for free."
David Mehegan can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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