Michael S. Hart
Sign in to saveAlso known as Michael Stern Hart, Michael Hart
American author, founder of Project Gutenberg (1947–2011)
Key facts
- Born
- Michael Stern Hart , ( 1947-03-08 ) March 8, 1947, Tacoma, Washington , U.S.
- Died
- September 6, 2011 (2011-09-06) (aged 64), Urbana, Illinois , U.S.
- Alma mater
- University of Illinois
- Occupation
- Author
- Known for
- Project Gutenberg
- Website
- hart .pglaf .org
via Wikipedia infobox
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- human
- Given name
- Michael
- Family name
- Hart
- Gender
- male
- Citizenship
- United States
- Place of birth
- Tacoma
- Place of death
- Urbana
- Occupation
- inventor
- Educated at
- University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign
- Official website
- pglaf.org/hart
Show 5 more facts
- Commons category
- Michael S. Hart
- date of birth
- 1947-03-08
- date of death
- 2011-09-06
- cause of death
- myocardial infarction
- manner of death
- natural causes
Sources (3)
via Wikidata · CC0
~5 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Michael Stern Hart (March 8, 1947 – September 6, 2011) was an American author credited with the invention of the e-book, and who founded Project Gutenberg (PG), the first project to make e-books freely available via the Internet. He published e-books via ARPANET years before the Internet existed, and later on BBS networks and Gopher servers.
Hart devoted his life after founding PG in 1971 to digitizing and distributing literature from works in the public domain with free and expired copyrights. The first e-books were typed in plain text format and published as text files; other formats were made available later. Hart typed most of the early e-books himself; later, volunteers expanded the project.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Michael S. Hart” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.