Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, has died
54 comments
·October 22, 2025mastazi
RIP. Project Gutenberg and IMSLP are two of my favourite websites. Every January, when new works enter the public domain, I go and download a bunch of books and sheet music. HN readers, let's not forget to donate to these websites that keep the Internet worth surfing.
zozbot234
While new works do trickle into the public domain every year, it's worth noting that copyright status is not currently the main bottleneck to public domain cultural works being made widely available to the public under F.A.I.R. (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles. There's a huge amount of extant literature and music in the public domain that someone has scanned and perhaps put up online as raw page images, but no one took the effort to transcribe/index/classify it yet and thus make it easily available for most uses - such that it might as well not exist as far as most people are concerned. This is where efforts like Project Gutenberg can be especially valuable.
kragen
That's true, but its framing sort of rests on an assumption of fungibility that doesn't really hold. There are many important cultural works whose copyright status is currently the main bottleneck to their being made widely available to the public.
Part of why this happens is that, in any medium, most works aren't very popular. A few years ago, someone who worked at YouTube told me that more than half of YouTube videos had zero views — not even the uploader had watched the video on the site. Most blogs have only one reader or a few readers. Most software projects have only one user.
Look at the things that someone has taken the effort to transcribe/index/classify, like the 9,785 books published in English in 01927 with full view available on the Hathi Trust website whose titles contain the word "A": https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Home?adv=1&setft=true&...
• The trustee and the A. L. A.
• The influence of hydrogen ion acitivity upon the stability of vitamin A
• The national cyclopedia of American biography : Current volumes A-
• A study of English drama on the stage / by Walter Prichard Eaton.
• The nations of the world : a pageant designed to show their contributions to civilization / prepared by the faculty of Public school 53, Buffalo, New York ; illustrated
• A book of shanties
• A book of prefaces / by H. L. Mencken
• A January birthday party / by Jack Bechdolt & George Illian
This last is a sort of instruction manual for throwing children's birthday parties. In January. It includes things like a cake recipe, suggested menus ("Hot Fricasseed Chicken. Hot Biscuits. Cranberry Sauce. Birthday Cake. Ice Cream. Chocolate Milk Shake. Candies. Nuts.") and tips for hanging crepe paper from plaster walls into which you cannot drive a nail or screw.
This kind of schlock, in aggregate, is immensely valuable as a window into how life has changed over the past century, but this particular book is extremely replaceable. If you were allocating limited resources to providing access to either A January Birthday Party or something like Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone it would be criminal to choose the former over the latter.
Yet that is what the current copyright laws require us to do.
This is not to deprecate Jack Bechdolt and George Illian; writing a schlocky easy-craft-tips newspaper column or book with cake recipes and unoriginal children's game ideas is a perfectly fine way to spend your time, much like baking a trout or unclogging a toilet. Surely publishing the book was, overall, beneficial to society, even if only slightly. Nothing suggests that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Bechdolt or https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q52156792 was anything other than a perfectly decent person. But that doesn't mean that preservation of the product of their activity is worth spending extra effort to preserve a century later, any more than the baked trout or the toilet clog would be.
I'd say that about 90% of the items in the Hathi Trust query result I linked above are of similarly insignificant value.
Even cultural works that have some enduring value on their own (I suspect The national cyclopedia of American biography and A book of shanties fall in this category) are not fungible with unavailable ones—no quantity of books of 19th-century folk tales forms an adequate substitute for the second edition of Sedgewick's Algorithms¹, nor vice versa.
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¹ I was dismayed to be unable to find the second edition when I was writing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45571196 the other day, and I believe that this problem is mostly a result of its copyright status.
zozbot234
> But that doesn't mean that ... the product of their activity is worth spending extra effort to preserve a century later, any more than the baked trout or the toilet clog would be.
Why not? What's a more likely question to an AI that might have been trained on these books: "Tell me some ideas for my kid's birthday party next January" or "Write out a huge book-length story about a magical school for wizards?" I surmise that the former is a lot more likely to happen than the latter. "Harry Potter" is just pure ephemera. Nobody will find it worthwhile in 200 years.
sevensor
Every year, Project Gutenberg becomes a little closer to giving us access to every book worth reading, often in multiple editions and languages. It’s a treasure.
BeetleB
Somewhat related: I met Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, many years ago:
https://blog.nawaz.org/posts/2011/Sep/michael-hart-has-passe...
knob
Thank you to Mr Greg Newby for this project. RIP
kragen
Newby did an enormous amount to help Project Gutenberg, but he was not its CEO or founder. Probably if you want to thank one person for the project it should be Michael Hart (PBUH). As WP explains:
> Newby got involved with Project Gutenberg in 1991 or 1992, became friends with founder Michael S. Hart, and was "undoubtedly the most consequential volunteer", according to a scholar writing about the history of the project.[10][21] In 2000 or 2001, Newby formed the associated nonprofit organization, the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, and became its director and CEO.[10][22][2] He also worked to integrate Distributed Proofreaders into the project.[21] He was a founding trustee of the Distributed Proofreaders Foundation at its formation in July 2006.[23][24] He led improvements to the technology platform underlying Project Gutenberg[25] and navigated challenges related to the copyright status of books in different countries.[26]
duk3luk3
Your citation appears to directly contradict your argument. How did this happen?
kragen
My citation explains that Michael Hart was the founder of PG, and the foundation that Newby headed didn't even exist until 02000. Newby would never in his life have wanted people to think that he had founded PG!
I've edited my comment above to make it clearer what its central argument is, since you seem to have misunderstood either the argument or the quote.
brobdingnagians
Sad that my first thought was "AI".
bux93
Yo, Taylor, I'm really happy for you. Imma let you finish, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.
bryanrasmussen
I'm generally pretty good at figuring out even the most abstruse jokes, but not getting this one. Care to explain?
melling
Recently competed in ultramarathons and has now died from cancer at age 60. Very sad.
There are new tests coming that will catch cancer early so hopefully it’s not late stage, increasing one’s survival rates.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/grail-stock-price-cancer-st...
I’m about Greg’s age and I had colon cancer last year. Now I can’t unsee cancer in the media.
thechao
I'm at high risk for colon cancer & had my first screening last year after putting it off. For those who've not done it yet: it's really no big deal. The most challenging part is drinking the fluids. Please get screened: caught early, it's easily curable, but it definitely kills.
exhilaration
My wife got this from her doctor as an alternative to a colonoscopy (in the US): https://www.cologuard.com/
It's an at-home collection stool test. It seems like a super easy and cheap first step before getting a colonoscopy.
melling
I took one of those. I was negative but definitely had a tumor. My doctor said you have to take the home test every year.
It’s no replacement for a colonoscopy. They’ll snip those polyps before they grow to become cancerous.
CaptainOfCoit
What is the difference in accuracy or other tradeoffs with that compared to a proper colonoscopy? Wasn't clear from the landing page, but I'm guessing there is something, at least not as high accuracy.
melling
Ask about the Sutab pills instead of the fluids.
Yes, the colonoscopy is a breeze, especially compared to the surgery and chemotherapy. The chemotherapy was definitely harsh. Fortunately, I was a candidate for only 3 months of treatment.
inflames123
RIP
kragen
Just to clarify, Greg Newby was not the CEO of Project Gutenberg, which was founded in 01971, but of the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, which he founded in 02000 or 02001. It has contributed immensely to Project Gutenberg, but they are not the same thing. Newby would never have attempted to take credit for PG.
Edit: the post title has been fixed now.
ron_k
Yes, the title has been changed. The one I posted clearly said "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation”.
rom1v
Are the years intended to be read in octal?
nappy-doo
It's one of these Long Now things. The goal is to get people to think in long term time frames.
kijin
According to javascript, 01971 is just 1971. Meanwhile, 01671 is 953.
kragen
Man! JS never stops trolling you.
drfuchs
That’s a ZipCode.
benterix
You got me curious about the leading zero.
kragen
Oh, it's just a bit of fun: https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-an...
You'd be amazed at how seriously people can take things like date formats sometimes.
armarr
The time we will collectively waste for the next 8k years typing that extra 0 will not weigh up against the benefit.
dkga
I love how each HN post is a gateway to miscellaneous obscure knowledge with a technical point behind it
casenmgreen
I find it improper that we count from 2025 years ago.
We should count from the beginning of time.
sangeeth96
There's an xkcd in the making here, if it doesn't exist already.
imdsm
Long term optimist perhaps
rana762
[dead]
zara762
[dead]
sunu2788
[dead]
I'm shocked and saddened to hear this. Greg was a deep source of knowledge and support as I started and shepherded Standard Ebooks. He was generous with his time and experience, and unbelievably patient with me, some guy he had never heard of or met before who was just another cold-email in what must have been an endless stream in his inbox. We should all aspire to his high spirit of camaraderie, charity, and kindness. The world has lost a champion of both literature and the free web.