After a summer in which several mainstream publishers have dipped a cautious toe into the slowly emerging electronic books, or e-books, market, Mr Michael Hart is less than impressed.
"I have never read an electronic book in my life," he says with some disdain. On the other hand, he has devoted most of his life to books in an electronic format. The difference is Mr Hart's books in electronic form are held on personal computers and available for free. E-books, usually priced at the cost of a hardback, are heralded as the next big thing in book publishing - even as the greatest innovation in reading since the invention of the printing press.
Despite the failure so far of the e-books market to ignite, analysts are confident that it will take off. Industry analyst Forrester believes that, by 2005, Americans will spend one of every six book-buying dollars on e-books - some $7.8 billion (€8.5 billion), or 17.5 per cent of all US book publishing revenue.
Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting) is more conservative, but still optimistic, pegging revenue at $2.3 billion by 2005.
Mr Hart, however, thinks this is all a lot of hot air. Reading books on a PC is nothing new, he argues, and has been not only possible but popular since PCs became a mass market item in the 1980s, despite what the publishers say. He also sniffs at the notion that, in order to read a book, someone must buy one of the costly ($200 or so) handheld readers created by companies such as Gemstar, Franklin or goReader just to peruse an e-book.
He should know. Mr Hart founded one of the internet's earliest and most innovative projects, Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org), which is creating a massive internet repository of free, non-copyright texts.
With some 17,000 books on his site, Gutenberg expects to celebrate placing its 20,000th book online by the end of this year, while 17 million are available over the web globally. Those numbers, Mr Hart says, put paid to the old chestnut that people don't like to read from computer screens.
Mr Hart started Project Gutenberg in 1976 - well before the advent of the PC, and when the existing internet was still called the DARPAnet and was managed by the US Department of Defence and open only to researchers, some government employees and other specialised users.
At the time, he had a job where he could gain access to the large mainframe computers of his employer, and says he had also become user number 100 of what would become the internet.
"The internet was unbelievably boring in the 1970s. Every single (e-mail) was by geeks, for geeks, and about geek stuff. They even sent around little ASCII (plain text) pictures of technical diagrams."
Nonetheless, he loved every minute of talking to those 99 others over the young Net. Late one night in 1976, he decided to type the US Declaration of Independence into the computer's memory, using a teletype machine, and then send it to the others on the network. To those who wanted a copy, he had to send it bit by bit at a time when memory was precious and expensive and the network primitive: "Sending 5,000 characters to 100 people would have crashed the whole Net."
Then he typed in the Bill of Rights as well and made it available to whomever might want to download it. Almost no one did.
By now an idea was forming in his head for an online library, and when he was given the equivalent of $100 million in computer time to set up a computer project of some sort, he knew it would be Project Gutenberg, although at first it was christened the Millennium Fulcrum - "because I was going to push the world screaming and kicking into the new millennium".
Maybe it was the name, but people didn't exactly flock to the idea - indeed, he says, they thought he was a bit crazy, spending hours typing or scanning in non-copyright texts into a computer. Either you worked with computers or you studied literature, but why would anyone want to mix the two in this seemingly bizarre way?
"I was an electronics freak since five and my dad was a Shakespeare professor, so the idea of putting Shakespeare into a computer wasn't such a big leap for me as it might have been for others," he explains.
Renamed Project Gutenberg, the library was one of those quirky online entities that many early internet users in the 1980s knew about, at least vaguely. But why did he keep plugging away at something that earned him no money at the time?
"I would have been happy for some company to fund the project and take it commercial, but the world wasn't interested and it was too good an idea not to do," he says.
Obscurity ended in the late 1980s when he acquired a copy of Alice in Wonderland and put it online. It was downloaded some 250,000 times between 1988 and 1989.
The chances are that if you were online then and downloaded a copy of Alice, you got it from Project Gutenberg. Part of its success must have been because people often want to check a quote from it or can't remember a line, he says.
Now, Project Gutenberg is one of the best-known online libraries and, with the ubiquity of the internet and the memory capacity of PCs, downloading and keeping the books is easy.
His main concern is the US's imposition of increasing restrictions on copyright, which he says is putting books out of circulation and threatening many more obscure texts with extinction. Copyright, which lasted 15 years after the death of an author at the turn of the century, now extends for 95 years.
"There's nothing going into the public domain right now," he says."There are millions of books we can't put on Project Gutenberg. All those books are still out of print.
"You literally ruin the link between the generations with this. If the Wright Brothers operated under that law, the blueprints for their plane design would only have gone online in January 1999."
Nonetheless, he's optimistic about the future of the free online book. "Ten years ago, there were only 17 books that you could download from the internet, and I'd done them all."
