Project Gutenberg creator Michael S. Hart dies at 64

[Hugh Wyn Griffith]

Just heard about this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/...FDK_story.html

Some people called Michael S. Hart a Don Quixote, always tilting at windmills.

As it happens, Cervantes’s classic tale of the man of La Mancha is one of the more than 36,000 books in Project Gutenberg, a monumental free online library that Mr. Hart conceived of four decades ago, when the Internet was in its infancy and generations before the birth of iTunes and Wikipedia.

Mr. Hart, 64, was found dead Sept. 6 at his home in Urbana, Ill. He had a heart attack, said his brother, Bennett Hart.

A self-described "truck driver who got loose in academia," Mr. Hart was a "legend" in the world of digital libraries, said Brewster Kahle, the founder of the online library Internet Archive.

Mr. Hart was credited with inventing the "eBook" in 1971. He often said he was just at the right place at the right time.

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