Word: gutenbergs
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Even more central to this globalization were the electronic technologies that revolutionized the distribution of information, ideas and entertainment. Five centuries ago, Gutenberg's advances in printing helped lead to the Reformation (by permitting people to own their own Bibles and religious tracts), the Renaissance (by permitting ideas to travel from village to village) and the rise of individual liberty (by allowing ordinary folks direct access to information). Likewise, the 20th century was transformed by a string of inventions that, building on the telegraph and telephone of the 19th century, led to a new information...
...protocol devised by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 created the World Wide Web, which simplified and popularized navigation on the Net. The idea that anyone in the world can publish information and have it instantly available to anyone else in the world created a revolution that will rank with Gutenberg...
...Prague slipped into tourist hotels to watch CNN reports on the upheavals in Berlin. A decade later, dissidents in China set up e-mail chains, and Web-surfing students evaded clueless censors to break the government's monopoly on information. Just as the flow of ideas wrought by Gutenberg led to the rise of individual rights, so too did the unfetterable flow of ideas wrought by telephones, faxes, television and the Internet serve as the surest foe of totalitarianism in this century...
Hart called his fledgling Internet site Project Gutenberg. Since then, with less than $100,000 in foundation money and 1,000 volunteers worldwide who hunt down books, type or scan them in and proofread, he has assembled a library of 2,250 entries. Go to www.gutenberg.net and you will find an eclectic array of works in the public domain, ranging from the Bible to Alice in Wonderland; from the Divine Comedy in Italian to Heimskringla, or the Chronicle of the Kings of Norway, translated from Old Norse...
...never finished grad school, runs the site from his Urbana home, adding 30 to 40 books a week. Next he hopes to start entering works of art and music. Hart contends that free books over the Internet will shake up civilization in the 21st century even more than Johannes Gutenberg's movable type did in the 15th. "Democracy," he says, "is dependent on people knowing enough to make a choice...