03-26-2004, 02:11 PM
Years ago, a professor in a prestigious university realized that many classic books are no longer in print and that the number of available copies were declining quickly, especially for many lesser known titles such as Lupin. Fearing that some of those titles willl be forever lost with the discontinuation of printed versions, he with other professors created non-profit organization called "Project Gutenberg," named after a German inventor Gutenberg, who invented pressing machine (we can all thank him for that - no books, CDs, DVDs without it). The organization's sole purpose is to prevent the loss of priceless creative works by preserving as many existing classic books into digital format as possible and thus ensure them to be forever available for current and future generations in the whole world to view for free. What a great idea!!!!!!!!!!! Most of the work is done by volunteers who donate their time and money. It's a lot of work scanning every page of a book, converting them into recognizable alphabet pattern, and proof-reading them when done. That's how some of Lupin books are available now. They also do movies and music. That means - who knows? Some day, they will open a Japanses branch and start doing animes, too. I know there is an Australian branch.
This is an interesting excerpt from Project Gutenberg.
"In 1971, Michael Hart was given $100,000,000 worth of computer time on a mainframe of the era. Trying to figure out how to put these very expensive hours to good use, he envisaged a time when there would be millions of connected computers, and typed in the Declaration of Independence (all in upper case--there was no lower case available!). His idea was that everybody who had access to a computer could have a copy of the text. Now, 31 years later, his copy of the Declaration of Independence (with lower-case added!) is still available to everyone on the Internet.
During the 70s, he added some more classic American texts, and through the 80s worked on the Bible and the collected works of Shakespeare. That edition of Shakespeare was never released, due to copyright law changes, but others followed.
Starting in 1991, Project Gutenberg began to take its current form, with many different texts and defined targets. The target for 1991 was one book a month. 1992's target was two books a month. This target doubled every year through 1996, when it hit 32 books a month.
Today, we have a target of 400 books a month."
He certainly had visions. Now, they have over 10,000 books available online to distribute.