評論
打印
Michael Hart
邁克·哈特
Michael Hart, father of e-books and founder of Project Gutenberg, died on September 6th, aged 64.
邁克·哈特，電子書之父，古登堡計劃創始人，于9月6日逝世，享年64歲。
AMONG the episodes in his life that didn't last, that were over almost before they began,
他的一生中有很多持續不長的段落，有一些在開始以前就幾乎結束了，
including a spell in the army and a try at marriage, Michael Hart was a street musician in San Francisco.
包括短暫的軍旅生活和婚姻。在這些段落中，邁克·哈特曾在舊金山當過街頭音樂家。
He made no money at it, but then he never bought into the money system much—garage-sale T-shirts, canned beans for supper, were his sort of thing.
這賺不了幾個錢，但他從不相信貨幣系統。在跳蚤市場里減價的T恤衫，豆子罐頭當晚餐，這些才像他的風格。
He gave the music away for nothing because he believed it should be as freely available as the air you breathed,
他把自己的音樂免費送給路人，因為他相信音樂應該像你所呼吸的空氣，
or as the wild blackberries and raspberries he used to gorge on, growing up, in the woods near Tacoma in Washington state.
或是他在華盛頓州塔克馬附近的森林里長大時經常用來填腹的野生漿果那樣予取予求的。
All good things should be abundant, and they should be free.
所有的好東西都應該是充足的，而且免費。
He came to apply that principle to books, too.
他的這個原則也被用于書本。
Everyone should have access to the great works of the world, whether heavy (Shakespeare, “Moby-Dick”, pi to 1m places), or light (Peter Pan, Sherlock Holmes, the “Kama Sutra”).
所有人都應該可以閱讀世界上的著作，不管是晦澀的（莎士比亞，“白鯨記”，圓周率記錄到小數點后一百萬位），還是輕松的（彼得潘，夏洛克·福爾摩斯，“愛經”）。
Everyone should have a free library of their own, the whole Library of Congress if they wanted, or some esoteric little subset;
所有人都應有自己的免費圖書館，想要的話可以是整個國會圖書館，或者是它其中冷門的一部分。
he liked Romanian poetry himself, and Herman Hesse's “Siddhartha”.
他本人就喜歡羅馬尼亞詩歌，和赫曼·赫塞的“悉達多”。
The joy of e-books, which he invented, was that anyone could read those books anywhere, free, on any device, and every text could be replicated millions of times over.
他發明的電子書的快樂在于任何人可以在任何地方免費地用任何儀器讀哪些書。而每一本都可以輕松地被復制一百萬份。
He dreamed that by 2021 he would have provided a million e-books each, a petabyte of information that could probably be held in one hand,
他曾夢想到2021年可以向世界上十億人提供人手一份一百萬本電子書，可以用一只手拿著的一千萬億字節的信息。
to a billion people all over the globe—a quadrillion books, just given away. As powerful as the Bomb, but beneficial.
這將會是免費贈送的一萬兆本書。和原子彈一樣強大，但是正面的強大。
That dream had grown from small beginnings: from him, a student at the University of Illinois in Urbana,
這個夢想的源頭是很小的：1971年7月4日晚上，他，伊利諾斯大學厄巴納分校的一名學生，
hanging round a huge old mainframe computer on the night of the Fourth of July in 1971, with the sound of fireworks still in his ears.
一邊傾聽著國慶的煙火，一邊撥弄著一臺巨大的主機電腦。
The engineers had given him by his reckoning $100m-worth of computer time, in those infant days of the internet.
當時還是互聯網的襁褓時期，據他說實驗室里的工程師讓給他的電腦用時價值高達一億美元。
Wondering what to do, ferreting in his bag, he found a copy of the Declaration of Independence he had been given at the grocery store,
不知道該干什么好，他在書包里搜出了一本雜貨店伙計送給他的獨立宣言，那一刻，靈感在他腦海里誕生了。
and a light-bulb pinged on in his head. Slowly, on a 50-year-old Teletype machine with punched-paper tape, he began to bang out “When in the Course of human events…”
緩慢的，利用一臺50歲的裝有打孔紙帶的電傳打字機，他開始了打下“于人類事務發展的過程中……”
This was the first free e-text, and none better as a declaration of freedom from the old-boy network of publishing.
這是第一份免費電子書，也是書籍從陳舊的出版網絡中獨立出來的一份宣言。
What he typed could not even be sent as an e-mail, in case it crashed the ancient Arpanet system;
當時為了防止老舊的阿帕網（ARPANET）當機他甚至不能用電郵發送該文件。
he had to send a message to say that it could be downloaded. Six people did, of perhaps 100 on the network.
他必須向其他人發送信息來告訴他們可以在這里下載該文件。當時網絡里的大約100人里有六個人下載了這份獨立宣言。
It was followed over years by the Gettysburg Address, the Constitution and the King James Bible, all arduously hand-typed, full of errors, by Mr Hart.
接下去的幾年這份書單上又增加了蓋茲堡演說，美國憲法和欽定版圣經，全都是哈特自己辛勤打字的結果，其中充滿了錯漏。
No one particularly noticed. He mended people's hi-fis to get by.
幾乎沒人注意到他的這項工程。他靠給人們修音響來勉強糊口。
Then from 1981, with a growing band of volunteer helpers scanning, rather than typing, a flood of e-texts gathered.
1981年開始，隨著越來越多的志愿者開始幫忙進行掃描取代打字，大量的電子書產生了。
By 2011 there were 33,000, accumulating at a rate of 200 a month, with translations into 60 languages, all given away free.
到2011年總共有33000本，累計平均一個月200本，共有60種語言的譯文，全部免費贈送。
No wonder money-oriented rivals such as Google and Yahoo! sprang up all round as the new century dawned, claiming to have invented e-books before him.
有著這么一座寶庫也就難怪一些以賺錢為目的的對手像是谷歌和雅虎在新世紀來臨時會上竄下跳，爭吵著他們在哈特之前發明了電子書。
He called his enterprise Project Gutenberg.
他把這個工程叫作古登堡計劃。
This was partly because Gutenberg with his printing press had put wagonloads of books within the reach of people who had never read before;
一方面古登堡發明了活字印刷使人們可以輕易拿到一車車的從沒讀過的書，
and also because printing had torn down the wall between haves and have-nots, literate and illiterate, rich and poor, until whole power-structures toppled.
同時印刷也摧毀了有產階級和無產階級，識字者和文盲，富人和窮人之間的高墻，最終導致了整個權力結構的解體。
Mr Hart, for all his burly, hippy affability, was a cyber-revolutionary, with a snappy list of the effects he expected e-books to have:
哈特，雖然看上去是個嬉皮友好的大塊頭，其實是一個網路革命家，他曾簡短地寫下他預計電子書能夠產生的影響。
Books prices plummet.
書價暴跌
Literacy rates soar.
識字率飚升
Education rates soar.
教育率飚升
Old structures crumble, as did the Church.
舊有結構垮臺，就像中世紀的教廷
Scientific Revolution.
科學革命
Industrial Revolution.
工業革命
Humanitarian Revolution.
人文革命
If all these upheavals were tardier than he hoped, it was because of the Mickey Mouse copyright laws.
這些巨變并沒有如期而來，很大的原因是米老鼠版權法。
Every time men found a speedier way to spread information to each other, government made it illegal.
每次有人找到可以更迅速地傳播信息的方法，政府就會將該方法列為非法。
During the lifetime of Project Gutenberg alone, the average time a book stayed in copyright in America rose from 30 to almost 100 years.
光是在古登堡計劃期間，美國書籍的平均版權保護期限從原來的30年上升到了將近100年。
Mr Hart tried to keep out of trouble, posting works that were safely in the public domain,
哈特努力不招惹麻煩，只發布已經很穩妥地位入公共領域內的書籍。
but chafed at being unable to give away books that were new, and fought all copyright extensions like a tiger.
但是不能發布新書仍然讓他痛苦。他像一只猛虎那樣和所有的版權保護續期作斗爭。
“Unlimited distribution” was his mantra. Give everyone everything! Break the bars of ignorance down!
他的口號是“無限發布”。予求予取！打破無知的枷鎖！
The power of plain words
簡單文字的力量
He lived without a mobile phone, in a chaos of books and wiring.
他沒有手機，每天住在一堆混亂的書籍和電線中。
The computer hardware in his basement, from where he kept an unbossy watch over the whole project,
他在他的地下室以放牛吃草的態度管理整個計劃，
often not bothering to pick up his monthly salary, was ten years old, and the software 20.
經常連自己的薪水也不拿。他的計算機硬件已經用了10年，軟件則有20年了。
Simple crowdsourcing was his management style, where people scanned or keyed in works they loved and sent them to him.
他的管理風格就是簡單的群眾合作，人們把自己喜愛的書用掃描或打字收錄下來再寄給他。
Project Gutenberg books had a frugal look, with their Plain Vanilla ASCII format, which might have been produced on an old typewriter;
古登堡計劃里的書其貌不揚，用最普通的ASCII編碼形式打成的文本，看上去無法分辨是否由老打字機做出來的。
but then it was content, not form, that mattered to Mr Hart. These were great thoughts,
但是對哈特來說重要的是內容，不是形式。書中有偉大的思想，
and he was sending them to people everywhere, available to read at the speed of light, and free as the air they breathed.
而他只是把這些思想以光速散播給世界各地的人們供其閱讀，且如同空氣一樣免費。
