Project Gutenberg: An opportunity to disseminate classics of India.
The Gutenberg Project was established by Michael Hart in 1971. It all began when Hart was given an operator's account with $100,000,000 of computing time in it by the operators of Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois,USA.
He soon came to the conclusion that the greatest value created by computers is not just computing, but storage, retrieval and searching what was stored in the libraries. Anything that can be entered into a computer can be reproduced indefinitely, what can be called 'replicator technology'. Once a book or any other item (including pictures, sounds and even 3-D items can be stored in a computer) than any number of copies can be made and available for everybody.
The mission statement of the project states that it seeks to encourage creation and distribution of ebooks. The project is not powered by financial or political power, but by ideas, ideals and idealism. It is run by volunteers and based on donations.
This is indeed a great project which will go down in history as a giant step for mankind to know each other and understand, next only to the printing press which made knowledge available to the common people. More details are available at www.gutenberg.org
Now the project has 100,000 books mostly classics and other books which are in the public domain for downloading free. Though there are many books published in various world languages in the collection, there are very few books in Sanskrit and Tamil. India's many languages with great literature are not part of the collection as the project is not known in India. India has many software professionals and software companies and they can do a great service to our languages by volunteering to add Indian books to the collection. The linguistic states were created to promote Indian languages, and they can also support this endeavour. All those who love their language can chip in with volunteering.
Then there is www.WorldeBookFair.org which along with Project Gutenberg and others offers almost 200,000,000 books for anybody to download free of charge or for a small fee.
Here is an opportunity for Indian languages to reach all literate people in the country and elsewhere in the world if they can join hands with the Gutenberg Project or start their own similar project. This will not only preserve but also disseminate the ancient literature of our languages to all people.
August 2, 2009.
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