Michael S. Hart, American author, founded Project Gutenberg (b. 1947)
Michael Stern Hart (March 8, 1947 – September 6, 2011) was an American author, best known as the inventor of the e-book and the founder of Project Gutenberg (PG), the first project to make e-books freely available via the Internet. He published e-books years before the Internet existed via the ARPANET, and later on BBS networks and Gopher servers.Hart devoted his life after founding PG in 1971 to digitizing and distributing literature from works in the public domain with free and expired copyrights. The first e-books were typed in plain text format and published as text files; other formats were made available later. Hart typed most of the early e-books himself; later, volunteers expanded the project.