MY VISION OF PROJECT GUTENBERG I see the effects of Project Gutenberg leading to an electronic library in every country, more than just every country, one for every language, and a library for every virtually every subject. These libraries would be operated by those with a serious interest in preserving the materials of a particular language, culture, subject or author-- or any other grouping someone was interested in. Anyone who wanted would be free to created theirs in whatever image they liked simply by collecting the relevant material from existing sources, then adding books of their own interest that might not have been in any other previous collections. I would like to see enough people working on such eLibraries that virtually every document a person wants that goes into the public domain in a given year should be expected online in that year. The preservation of the public domain now must be a twofold operation, for once the current element of the public domain is completed, it will become more and more obvious to a public that now rarely thinks about such things, that the public domains of most major countries have been taken hostage-- so to speak--and are now being ransomed by public domain thieves and kidnappers who prefer a rather "pay per everything" economic model than thoughts that there should actually been anything free. As we have seen over the recent years, and indeed over the recent centuries, governments may give a certain lip service pretense to public interests, but when the chips are down, the good reporter as always has to just "follow the money" to find out why the public interest is being sacrificed to an assortment of publishing interests, unified under banners that say "The World Intellectual Property Organization." WIPO has, for all intents and purposes, written a series of copyright laws for every major country, starting via its earliest element, The Stationers Guild, later The Stationers Company, from England and thence onwards to forming those international cartels over the last three centuries whose major purpose has been the extension of copyright and a proportional shrinking of the public domain. Is The Public Domain Really Shrinking Obviously before copyright it was legal to copy a book from any source, and there was a reason, the rich were the only ones who could afford to copy, and no one makes laws to stop the rich from using their money to do things the commoners can't do. For the entire history of writing any rich person could hire scribes or monks to spend entire years of their lives of each book they wanted copied. No one really cared, for who but the rich knew in any detail what they were doing. Don't forget that only 1% of the world population even knew how to read, and that included mostly a large percentage of the rich nobility, and then a small cadre of scribes and monks who lived at the pleasure of those who sent alms their way. But Johannes Gutenberg changed all that in ~1450, when he invented a technology so advanced that it allowed commoners to buy books that it previously cost as much to buy as to buy a family farm. Gutenberg's invention is the root of civilization as we know it, a civilization based on production so powerful that we call is "mass production." Gutenberg's little print shop could turn out book production that would have taken an army of monks and scribes years to create, and could sell those books at a huge profit for a small fraction of an earlier price structure set by monks and scribes, who had had rather complete monopolies for books, ledgers, pamphlets, even flyers, for millennia. The immediate results were staggering. Within 50 years of Gutenberg's invention books in numbers greater than all the books ever made were on the market at prices the masses could afford. The result was that literacy expanded beyond that 1% level it had been ordained at for a millennium after millennium after millennium of history, and for the first time the masses had information not given to them from the mouths of the rich nobles. This upset the applecart, so to speak, and nobles were never, ever, able to put the genie back into the bottle. . .not with all the King's horses and all the King's men. There is no way to overestimate the effect of The Gutenberg Press. In the end The Gutenberg Press is responsible for revolutions in literacy, the arts, sciences, even for the rebirth of the ancient civilizations such as is known as The Rennaissance, and thence on to The Scientific Revolution. Scholars will argue that there were other causes, and they can point out smaller specifics for such other pretenders to the throne of such civilizing forces, but their examples are pittances compared to the magnitude of The Gutenberg Press. Just one small counterexample would be 95 Theses, by Martin Luther, that literally shook The Church of The Holy Roman Empire to its foundations. Without The Gutenberg Press it is highly unlikely that anyone but a few close friends would have an idea of what Luther was saying, other than a very few The Church would have sent to flay him alive, and force him to recant in public a la Galileo. As it was, The Gutenberg Press gave Martin Luther a form of leverage previously unknown, The Church had no idea how to deal with it. It was, as they say, "The Day the World Changed." "A Lever Long Enough and I Will Move the Earth." So said Archimedes thousands of years ago. Johannes Gutenberg provided that lever, and Earth was definitely moved. While The Church had been able to stifle the work of Galileo and others by simply burning the books they wrote and often burning the authors, this is a different proposition entirely when there might be a world full of such mass produced books. Martin Luther became too famous, too fast for The Church to be able to wipe out without effects too far and wide. . .the result of a new leverage for the individual to move the mass of institutions a world had previously seen as immovable. "There is no power greater than I idea whose time has come." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe When an object that has remained immovable for an entire history of civilization meets irresistible forces that are newborn, the immovable object has no chance, for the newborn irresistable force has all of its growth ahead of it while the object in questions has all of its growth behind it. When Irresistible Force Meets An Immovable Object [Much more on this subject in my other articles-- start with The Fifth Information Age, etc.] However this would not be the last book stifling. As soon as the monks and stationers realized that their histories long monopoly on bookmaking was a thing of the past they started a long complicated set of political and legal wranglings that failed again and again and again for over 150 years, but that did not deter them, for they knew their very existence depended on that monopoly. Henry VI was on the throne when they started, and refused to undo the effect of The Gutenberg Press so they could regain their monopoly. Even "The Restoration" that ousted Edward IV, and put Henry VI back on the throne would not restore the monopoly of The Stationers, and nor would the coronation of Edward V. Even the reign of Richard The Lionhearted of fame in so many areas resisted The Stationers: as did that of his successor, Henry VII. Henry VIII was suitably lobbied by The Stationers for decades, but never felt they should get their monopoly back by royal decree, nor would they get any such satisfaction from daughter Elizabeth I. In between those two, The Stationers failed via a series of attempts at Edward VI, Mary, and Philip & Mary, who reigned between father and daughter. Even James I of King James' Bible fame, would not yield to their pressures, nor would Charles I, or The Commonwealth, or Charles II or James II. The list is long, and I intentionally included it for the purpose of making sure you understand the great resistance to copyright. William & Mary would not be swayed, nor a William reigning alone, but finally Queen Anne propped up by a menagerie of political forces, succumbed for the necessary moment, after over 150 years, and a dozen and a half reigns back to Gutenberg's day. In 1709-10, various editions of the first working copyright law were passed, in great turmoil and a country that had boasted 6,000 books in print for previous years was reduced to having only 600, as a result of the immediate takeover of publishing, all publishing, by The Stationers Company. The days of unlimited publication were over. I won't go into detail here about how restrictive was the reign of The Stationers, or how other law was created in other countries at their behest. Suffice it to say that there have been five great technological revolutions in publishing that were headed off from changing the world in this manner since then: 5. The Internet: Stifled by 1998 US Copyright. 4. Xerox Presses: Stifled by 1976 US Copyright. 3. Electric Presses: Stifled by 1909 US Copyright. 2. Steam Presses: Stifled by 1831 US Copyright. 1. Gutenberg Press: Stifled by 1709 Copyright In the last 100 years along, US Copyright removed millions of books from what would have been their rightful public domain status under the law under which they were contracted for, paid for and then eventually published: leaving a public without a large portion of the public domain. In fact, before the 1909 copyright, most US books expired in 30 years, simply because publishers in those days did not renew copyrights on many books other than the top selling 10%. Under pressure from The Stationers Guild and such modern new decsendants as "The World Intellectual Property Organization," now supported by a United Nations mandate, no less, copyrights have been in a state of flux, changing every time publishing's power elite decide they want to kill off a public domain that has already been reduced to fractions and ever smaller fractions. In 1900 US copyright was such that literally half of all copyrighted materials had expired at given times of history, leaving half under copyright as seemed to be the wishes of the founding fathers. However, under the 1998 US Copyright Act we might expect 99.99% of copyrights ever issued, to still be in force by the time the first one of the 1998 copyrights expires in just under 100 years. What Will Project Gutenberg Be in 100 Years? Thus I fully expect that Project Gutenberg or its descendants could create an eLibrary of virtually everything they can find in the public domain and do it before 2020, when I expect it should become obvious to all that the number of eBooks selected from public domain is declining, simply because a public domain source has been exhausted via legal wranglings of the publishing industry and that no more copyright expirations but significantly less copyright expirations are taking place, in an age labeled as "The Information Age," but really is a "New Dark Age" introduced by the publishers via a continuing expansion of copyright, and continuing the rape and pillage of the public domain started by that first copyright law promoted for so long, over a period of 18 Kings and Queens of England. The growth of Project Gutenberg is simple to make predictions for, as long as you stick to the book population that is already in the public domain-- at least in the US. [Note bene: some more fascistic countries have a legal process whereby books are actually illegal, after a certain date, whereas they were OK before that date, in terms of being public domain. That includes The United Kingdom, Germany and Italy.] Right now there are probably at least 20 million, or so, books in the public domain in most places. Presuming the following growth rate of eBooks for free download during any given year: 2006 1.0 million 2007 1.5 million 2008 2.0 million 2009 2.5 million 2010 3.0 million it will take only a very slight increase in eBook production each year as far as yearly rates go to be sure the total reaches 10 million before 2020, in fact, my own prediction is that it will not be nearly as long as until 2020. However, once 10 million eBook ARE available, the truth will become obvious that it is not going be nearly the same for the next 10 million, as WIPO, and others such as Disney and other megacorps had always planned for no copyright expirations. Thus the battle will not be to find ways of doing more and more public domain books, but to keep up the existence of the public domain at all as none of the titles published under the new laws should ever be expected to become public domain under an increasingly repressive copyrights structure laid down by WIPO and the other publishing interests. The whole idea[l] from their perspective is to an electronic "pay per" system in which nothing free ever comes the way of the public. Governments are willing to go along with this for an assortment of reasons: 1. An ignorant public is easily manipulated. 2. The publishers lobbyists make it "valuable." 3. All of the "pay per" transactions = taxable!