Michael Hart, who has died of a heart attack aged 64, referred to himself as the "grandfather of ebooks", but his real aim was to change the world. In 1971, he realised that electronic texts could be copied and distributed at no cost, and he founded Project Gutenberg to make out-of-copyright books freely and universally available. His mission was to "help break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy".
Since this was in the pre-internet days of the early Arpanet, there were only a couple of dozen computers on the network, but as Hart said, echoing Confucius: "Even the greatest journeys start with but a single step." At the end of Hart's journey, Project Gutenberg's aim was to distribute a billion free ebooks: 10m books in 100 languages.
The project started by accident, after a Fourth of July fireworks display. A student at the University of Illinois, Hart had been given some free time on the mainframe computer. "We were just coming up on the American bicentennial and they put faux-parchment historical documents in with the groceries," he said in 2002. "So, as I fumbled through my backpack for something to eat, I found the US Declaration of Independence and had a lightbulb moment. I thought for a while to see if I could figure out anything I could do with the computer that would be more important than typing in the Declaration of Independence, something that would still be there 100 years later, but couldn't come up with anything, and so Project Gutenberg was born."
Hart thus became the internet's first information provider, before the internet had been invented. As he said later: "Project Gutenberg was just one of those great combinations of luck and being the right person in the right place at the right time." In the beginning, he typed every word himself, originally on a Teletype terminal on to punched paper tape. After the Declaration of Independence, John F Kennedy's inaugural address, Lincoln's Gettysburg address and other civic documents, he started on the King James Bible. It finally appeared online in 1989. The first novel was Moby-Dick.
For 17 years, "it was just me tilting at windmills," said Hart. He typed in 313 books before the next breakthrough: he linked up with the University of Illinois's new PC user group. With help from a colleague, Mark Zinzow, Hart set up a mailing list to publicise his project, and started asking for volunteers to contribute. By the end of the year, the e-library had grown to about 1,600 titles. It was an early example of "crowdsourcing" and paralleled the growth of personal computing and the open-source programming movement.
As volunteers took over the rapidly growing project, Hart set up the non-profit Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation in 2000. With books increasingly being scanned rather than retyped, Distributed Proofreaders was set up, providing volunteers to check them. These scans now make up a large proportion of the project's 36,000 texts.
In an email interview with the journalist Richard Poynder in 2006, Hart stated: "The biggest problem is the time it takes to do the necessary copyright research before making an e-text. The next biggest is dealing with the constant threat of lawsuits, which come in every year."
In particular, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (1998), which extended US copyright terms by 20 years, had a devastating effect, shrinking the public domain by, in Hart's view, a million books. He told Poynder: "We spent nearly the entire 1980s working on an edition of Shakespeare that was expected to go into the public domain, but failed to do so when the copyright laws were changed."
Hart was born in Tacoma, near Seattle, in Washington state. His father was an accountant, and his mother – a former wartime codebreaker – was a business manager at a department store. Both decided to retrain as teachers. In 1958, the family moved to Urbana, Illinois, where his father taught Shakespeare studies and his mother taught mathematics at the University of Illinois. After various adventures and a stint in the army, where he served in Korea, Hart enrolled at the university's Urbana-Champaign campus in 1971. He graduated in two years. Then Project Gutenberg took over his life.
He supported himself by doing odd jobs, and was extremely frugal. He told Poynder: "It's hard for me to spend $10 on dinner; the average is well under $5. I have no cable [TV] or cell phone. I ride a bicycle most of the time. I also wear garage sale clothes; in fact I live just about totally on garage sales." An unpaid appointment as adjunct professor at Illinois Benedictine College helped him to solicit donations for his project. "I know that sounds odd to most people, but I just never bought into the money system all that much. I never spent it when I got it. It's all a matter of perspective; most people spend the vast majority of their money on things I just don't care about."
Earlier this year, on 16 July, Hart wrote to supporters such as the Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle to say he was "working to create a graceful exit" from the project "without any of the repercussions that could take place when I shuffle off this mortal coil". He was feeling his age, and planned to move to Hawaii.
Hart is survived by his mother, Alice, and his brother, Bennett.
• Michael Stern Hart, digital archivist, born 8 March 1947; died 6 September 2011
