I am hardly alone in my debt of gratitude. I remember a story Norman Coombs told me years ago about his first contact with Project Gutenberg. He was so thrilled to read Shakespeare using his computer with voice synthesizer that he downloaded the Complete Works, just so he knew he would have it all in an accessible format whenever he wanted. Whether he read all of Shakespeare – or not – the accessibility was empowering. Norm’s book, The Black Experience in America, is accessible now via Project Gutenberg.

Hart understood this transformational drive for access to literacy when he wrote in July: “One thing about eBooks that most people haven’t thought much is that eBooks are the very first thing that we’re all able to have as much as we want other than air. Think about that for a moment and you realize we are in the right job.”

Amen, and thank-you, Michael Hart!

The Guardian recounts how Hart published his first digital text on the Internet:

In 1971, Hart was given extensive computer time by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the University of Illinois. Not wanting to waste the opportunity, he pondered carefully what to do with his time. “I happened to stop at our local IGA grocery store on the way. “We were just coming up on the American Bicentennial and they put faux parchment historical documents in with the groceries. So, as I fumbled through my backpack for something to eat, I found the US Declaration of Independence and had a lightbulb moment. I thought for a while to see if I could figure out anything I could do with the computer that would be more important than typing in the Declaration of Independence, something that would still be there 100 years later, but couldn’t come up with anything, and so Project Gutenberg was born,” he said in an interview in 2002.

Today, Project Gutenberg is one of the largest collections of free ebooks in the world.

“What allowed me to think of this particular use for computers so long before anyone else did is the same thing that allows every other inventor to create their inventions: being at the right place, at the right time, with the right background. As Lermontov said in The Red Shoes: ‘Not even the greatest magician in the world can pull a rabbit out of a hat if there isn’t already a rabbit in it’,” said Hart in 2002. “You have to remember that the internet had just gone transcontinental and this was one of the very first computers on it.

“Somehow I had envisioned the net in my mind very much as it would become 30 years later. I envisioned sending the Declaration of Independence to everyone on the net… all 100 of them… which would have crashed the whole thing, but luckily Fred Ranck stopped me, and we just posted a notice in what would later become comp.gen. I think about six out of the 100 users at the time downloaded it.”

Via ReadWriteWeb:

Sony just announced that owners of the Sony Reader can now access over 1 million free, out of copyright and public domain eBooks from the Google Books library. Sony first announced this deal with Google earlier this year, but at that time, it only offered about 500,000 free books. Barnes & Noble, which announced its eBook store and forthcoming hardware eReader last week currently features about 500,000 free books from Google, while Amazon’s Kindle can read free books from Project Gutenberg, but doesn’t offer compatibility with the ePub format that Google prefers. Amazon currently offers about 300,000 books. Read more

See, for example, “#Amazonfail, the Google Books Settlement, and the importance of open access for preserving cultural heritage: In honor of National Library Week” posted on April 16:

Over the past two years for National Library Week, I have posted about the importance of openness of publication and accessibility of government information and the limitations of relying on Google. Free Government Information, Public.Resource.org, OpentheGovernment (PDF),  and others, are continuing to do a great job of promoting openness in regards to government (and scholarly) information. Unfortunately, most people are not aware of the great usefulness and importance of government information. But they do know about Amazon, Google, and YouTube, with many among us using them everyday. What would many do to find information if they stopped working?

The #Amazonfail censorship/ glitch / griefing situation last weekend shows the power of publics working together and the organic nature of much of tagging and movementsourcing; people will often be able to create a simple way of communicating information with each other (the first person to use the #Amazonfail tag on twitter used it because it worked as a folksonomy of the situation and it spiralled from there because it was effective). But it also shows the difficulty for all when most rely on one source — Amazon — for information about bestsellers and similar items.

Great work, Learned Fangirls!

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama participate in tree plantings at the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens in Washington on 4/21/09. [Official White House Photo by Pete Souza]

See the White House photostream on Flickr. Who knew?

Creative Commons explains why the White House chose a CC license instead of acknowledging that the photos belong in the public domain:

The microblogs have been a-buzz this morning about news of the launch of the official White House Flickr stream featuring photos from Obama’s first 100 days in office. While the photos are licensed under our Attribution license, one could make the very strong argument that they’re actually in the public domain and can be used without attribution (though one would have to be careful and respect the personality rights of the private citizens featured in some of the photos). The photos are likely in the public domain because they are works created by the federal government and not entitled to copyright protection. As you might recall, the Whitehouse.gov’s copyright notice indicates as much.

Why would the White House then choose Attribution for their Flickr stream? Simple, unlike communities like Wikipedia and Thingiverse, Flickr doesn’t allow their photographers to choose Public Domain as an option to release their work to the world. So the Obama team must have picked the next best option: Attribution only.