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Project Gutenberg

daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (roden@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Wed Jul 10 09:36:02 1991

From: roden@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
To: developers@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 91 09:34:38 EDT


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To: O&S Managers <o&sm@po.mit.edu>
Subject: FYI:  Project Gutenberg
Date: Wed, 10 Jul 91 09:15:12 EDT
From: Roger A. Roach <rar@mit.edu>


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Date: Wed, 10 Jul 91 08:59:22
From: jdb@MIT.EDU (James D. Bruce)
To: isdir@MIT.EDU, libtalk@MIT.EDU, nearnet-sc@nic.near.net
Subject: Project Gutenberg


Thought that you might be interested in seeing this description of the 
project.............................................................jim

Date:         Tue, 9 Jul 91 14:58:49 CDT
Sender: Machine Readable Texts Email List <GUTNBERG@VMD.CSO.UIUC.EDU>
From: "Michael S. Hart" <HART@VMD.CSO.UIUC.EDU>

...

The goal of Project Gutenberg is to distribute one trillion
electronic texts (etexts, by the year 2001.  This is to be done
by making 10,000 different titles available to the users of 100
million computers in the English speaking world.  Thus, anyone,
young or old, student or teacher, scholarly or just curious, is
to have access to a broad general information collection to use
anytime, anywhere, thus creating at least the beginnings of the
"level playing field" we hear about, but rarely see.

This is the first effort of what might become known sometime as
"replicator" technology, a technology which will change history
after "mass production" as much as mass production changed life
from the handmade items which preceded mass productions.  Those
of you who have not studied this may not realize that it was in
mostly in the century that mass production really changed world
events, the world economy, and created the whole concept of the
world economy as we know it.  This bears further discussion.

Mass production allowed, for the first time, what was basically
the production of as many copies of a product as were wanted in
a manner which required only a small fraction of the labor that
went into the making of copy that was not mass produced.  Today
this same possibility exists again, 100 years later with etexts
which will be closely followed by electronic copies of all kind
from music (already on the market but kept at artificially high
prices and with copies artificially limited) to artwork.  These
are already available to those who have delved deeply into that
new area of computing which involves this exchange of extremely
massive quantities of data over networks, telephone lines, or a
simple disk in the mail.  CDROM is already so efficient that an
enormous amount of information can be stored on one disk of the
type you play in a cd music player, and therefore these billion
characters of information can be mailed from place to place for
one dollar even though it contains one thousand large books.

Once the disk has been designed, the cost of reproducing it for
the masses is ridiculously low, on the order of a dollar or two
per copy, including labels printed on the disks, plastic boxes,
and shipping from the pressing plant to wherever a distribution
center might be located (within reason).  Mentioned previously,
this extraordinarily low cost of production is sometimes masked
by the face of those who sell the products.  However, the price
will continue to drop as competition forces these faces to drop
their pretenses of large overhead expenses.

(Example:  many of you have seen various compact disks [that is
what cd stands for] for sale for only a few dollars.)

However, this is not the goal of Project Gutenberg, to market a
few gigabyte collections of the worlds greatest books as etexts
on cd or through the networks.  Our goal is to create the First
National Public Library (actually it is already international).
A library that is truly Public, Public Domain (or Shareware) so
that all books in it can be copied and distributed without cost
for anything but your own materials and efforts.  People should
be able to locate and copy Public Domain (and Shareware) books,
paintings, drawings, photographs, etc. without undue efforts or
expenses.  That is going to be the first great contribution and
recognition of "replicator technology."

The creation and distribution of the National Public Library is
going to be as easy and as inexpensive as typing and phone call
efforts are.  Anyone can type (or scan) in their favorite books
from the Public Domain (or copyright protected with permission)
on a computer and either phone the data in or mail it in on any
disk format.  Our copyright advisors will check to make sure we
are in compliance with current copyright laws, and your book is
then distributed.  Anyone who reads it is a proofreader, and an
error is easily corrected once it is pointed out.  This is very
easy and a great advantage over conventional paper printing.


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