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Project Gutenberg Fears No Google

By

Vauhini Vara The Wall Street Journal Online

Updated Dec. 10, 2005 12:01 a.m. ET

Internet giants like Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. are making headlines with their rival plans to create online libraries of books. Long before those companies even existed, though, there was Project Gutenberg: an ambitious, offbeat effort to digitize classic books by typing them out by hand.

The approach made a lot of sense back in 1971, when Project Gutenberg's founder Michael Hart was a student at the University of Illinois. He enlisted an army of volunteers to help in the effort, by pulling their own dusty volumes from...

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Project Gutenberg Fears No Google

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