Michael Hart had a grand vision, which he named Project Gutenberg: e-books for all, for free. He aimed to provide “a million e-books each to a billion people all over the globe”.

Hart was the founder of the e-books industry and, in the week that The Human Race came out on Kindle, I read about his passing. Had Michael Hart lived, he planned to achieve his goal by 2021: fully 50 years after his light bulb moment when, as a student at the University of Illinois, he first conceived his plan. That year he published none other than the Declaration of Independenceon the university’s mainframe computer. Apparently six people downloaded his submission and the first Project Gutenberg e-book was born, fully 36 years before Amazon launched its Kindle.

As of June 2011, Project Gutenberg e-books numbered some 36,000, with an average of more than 50 new titles being added each week. Most are books with copyright that has expired in the US, and this is evident in Project Gutenberg’s “most downloaded” list. The top 20 is dominated by American and English authors who died years ago. They include Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen, Lewis Carroll, Bram Stoker, Charlotte Bronte and Charles Dickens.

There are, of course, some surprises. The number one Project Gutenberg e-book download is the Karma Sutra. The illustrated edition, no less! And the 2010 CIA Fact Book holds strong at number 16. Sex and spying: a potent combination. Especially when it’s free.

Project Gutenberg is clearly a worthy cause and Hart deserves to be celebrated for bringing some of the greatest works of fiction to a wider audience who are thirsty for knowledge. As stated on the Project Gutenberg website: “E-books are an efficient and effective way of unlimited free distribution of literature. Access to e-books can thus provide opportunity for increased literacy. Literacy, and the ideas contained in literature, creates opportunity.”

Hart was a revolutionary. Project Gutenberg always stayed within the law, but he believed that copyright obstructed his vision. For this reason I suspect he would have been absolutely delighted to see the disruption to trad publishing. I wonder if Michael Hart wasn’t delighted to witness some of the disruption that e-books are now bringing to the “in-copyright” market place. As a recently published author I find it both scary… and liberating;

• The internet has been a great leveler for authors, allowing their voices to be heard in numbers unimaginable just five years ago. E-books have enabled that, for precisely the same reasons that drew Hart to them back in 1971. However the internet has also created a huge amount of noise above which you now have to shout very loudly to be heard. Having a fancy web site, a great blog and loads of Twitter followers are no longer enough. Instead, such media has become the base line – and both publishers and authors need to up their game as a result.

• The reduced cost of entry has also destroyed pricing models. This is great for the consumer.  Look at the top ten paid books on Kindle UK: five are less than a pound. However it also means that substantial sales are required to make a good living as an author, especially if you are just entering the market. For many publishers and authors, this new pricing model may prove to be unsustainable.

I have no problem with any of this. It’s the market we are in and, as in any market, the best deserve to win handsomely.

In the meantime, e-books are here to stay and Project Gutenberg e-books will continue to be given away for free. And so I will continue to work my socks off to add to my readership, one e-book lover at a time!

This post was selected for Book Marketing Blog Carnival – October 26, 2011, hosted by Selling Books and Self-Publishing: Carnival of the Indies Issue #14, hosted by The Book Designer.

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