Q:What happens to an idea that shows up before its time?
A:It gets branded 'crazy'
Such has always been the brand that pathbreakers favor. If Michael Hart had not persisted in his dream to 'eClassify' (imagine a 'TM' next to the word - I just coined it and it means trying to convert to electronic form books that have been around long enough to touch several generations of readers and hence be termed classics) there would be no Project Gutenberg which is now 13,000 ebooks in 25 languages and going really strong. The digitization of books is done entirely by volunteers.
I have enjoyed the texts downloaded from Gutenberg on several occasions earlier and I mainly favor them because it is so easy to do Alt-Tab and read them alongside some mundane computer tasks like starting servers and running scripts that take forever. The other delightful thing about Gutenberg is the file size of the downloads. Where else can you hope to find the electronic version of the Moon and Sixpence bundled into 161KB?
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
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