News arrived of the death of Michael S. Hart (Photo ©Marcello), the founder of Project Gutenberg.

Michael Stern Hart was born on March 8, 1947, in Tacoma, Washington. At the University of Illinois, Hart began working on a computer, specifically on the Xerox Sigma V mainframe, which was also equipped with a connection to what would become the Internet. He made an assessment of the value of computer time and felt compelled to use it to create something of value that would also last.

Thus Michael Hart typed the Declaration of Independence of the USA making the electronic text obtained that way available to anybody on the then ARPANET with the idea that digitized text could be reproduced almost without cost. From that idea came the Gutenberg Project, so named because according to Hart the creation of digital books freely distributable was as epoch-making as Gutenberg’s press.

Over time, with the help of other volunteers who joined Project Gutenberg, Michael Hart put at the disposal of the whole world a growing number of digitized texts.

In 2000, Project Gutenberg became a non-profit organization with Gregory Newby as CEO. In the following years, some of the texts were made ​​available on CD and DVD whose ISO images were made ​​available for download. Now over 100,000 ebooks are available through Project Gutenberg and its partners.

On Tuesday, September 6, 2011, Michael S. Hart passed away. With his project he fought to encourage the creation and distribution of books in electronic format, to eliminate ignorance and illiteracy, and to provide as many books in electronic form to as many people as possible.

The name of Michael S. Hart wasn’t as famous as other persons of the digital age yet his effort was of enormous importance to the free spread of culture. Project Gutenberg can continue without him but we all owe him for having dedicated his life to a project of such high value.