[HN Gopher] Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg Literary Archiv...
___________________________________________________________________
Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation,
has died
Author : ron_k
Score : 492 points
Date : 2025-10-22 09:05 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pgdp.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pgdp.net)
| knob wrote:
| Thank you to Mr Greg Newby for this project. RIP
| kragen wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Your citation appears to directly contradict your argument.
| How did this happen?
| brobdingnagians wrote:
| Sad that my first thought was "AI".
| kragen wrote:
| 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.
| bux93 wrote:
| Yo, Taylor, I'm really happy for you. Imma let you finish,
| but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I'm generally pretty good at figuring out even the most
| abstruse jokes, but not getting this one. Care to explain?
| kragen wrote:
| It wasn't that abstruse 15 years ago.
|
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/kanye-interrupts-imma-let-
| you...
|
| The difference, in my view, is that Taylor Swift wasn't
| being incorrectly given credit for Beyonce's video.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| ok yeah I knew the reference I just wasn't getting how
| they thought it applied here.
| sevensor wrote:
| On the award of her Grammy, Kanye West grabbed the
| microphone and said this to Taylor Swift. I think Newby
| is Swift in this analogy.
|
| Edit: MTV Video Music Award, not Grammy.
| dkga wrote:
| Wow I can't believe this happened!
| kragen wrote:
| Just wait until you find out who won the US presidential
| election.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| I can't tell if sarcasm, but he was very drunk, and it
| became one of his first big scandals. He's had so many
| more after that it pales in comparison.
| mastazi wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.ha
| thitrust.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 _Algorithms_ 1, nor vice
| versa.
|
| ______
|
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| kragen wrote:
| For a couple of different reasons.
|
| The first is literary merit: reading Harry Potter is a
| great deal more enjoyable than reading Bechdolt's book.
| Rowling may not be Homer or Shakespeare, and there are
| things about her books that could be better, but reading
| them has been an extremely popular activity since they
| were first published. I suspect that, if there are people
| in 200 years, less of them will read Rowling than do
| today. But there are still people reading works first
| published 200 years ago today, even fictional works.
| _Pride and Prejudice_ was published in 01813,
| _Frankenstein_ was first published in 01818, _Rip Van
| Winkle_ was published in 01819, _The Legend of Sleepy
| Hollow_ was published in 01820, _The Last of the
| Mohicans_ was published in 01826, _Self-Reliance_ was
| published in 01841, _The Cask of Amontillado_ was
| published in 01846. Maybe Rowling doesn 't rise to the
| level of Austen, but I'd definitely put her above
| Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper.
|
| The second is that the humans, unable to think about the
| world directly, instead think in terms of narratives and
| metaphors, and they get these narratives and metaphors
| from the stories that other humans tell, which are
| necessarily more or less fictional, even when they
| attempt to describe reality. In order to understand human
| culture, then, there is no replacement for understanding
| those stories. _Harry Potter_ , like _Rambo_ , _The
| Matrix_ , and _Frankenstein_ , supplies metaphors and
| narratives through which nearly everyone today interprets
| the world around them, even if they haven't read it
| themselves; and its influence will continue as long as
| there are people.
|
| If you want to understand how English-speaking people
| thought 200 years ago, or how people think today, you
| should read _Frankenstein_ , among other things. And if
| someone in 200 years wants to understand how people think
| today, they should also read _Harry Potter_.
|
| This is obvious sometimes when people use _words_ from
| the books--Muggles, horcrux, mudblood--but it also
| happens in a much subtler and more pervasive way.
|
| Bechdolt's book just doesn't have the same kind of
| importance.
| gabriel666smith wrote:
| >Harry Potter('s)... influence will continue as long as
| there are people.
|
| That was a fun sentence!
|
| What do you see as being the predominant, near-universal
| metaphors and narratives supplied by _Rambo_? That 's an
| absolutely fascinating point of view.
| kragen wrote:
| I haven't watched it, so I may not be the best person to
| answer that.
|
| However, I remember in about 01990 seeing an episode of
| _Alien Nation_ (also fictional) reference a famous scene
| from it as one of the extraterrestrial characters is
| struggling to assimilate into human culture and construct
| a gender identity for himself (https://subslikescript.com
| /series/Alien_Nation-96531/season-...
| https://youtu.be/AqiPbBxLpNU):
|
| > _Like some Newcomer men. They don 't feel truly
| masculine until after they've given birth._
|
| > _I 'm afraid, George, that giving birth doesn't quite
| cut it. You ever see movies? Remember Sylvester Stallone?
| That beefy fellow with the headband, always had a big
| gun? Remember that scene in First Blood when Stallone
| falls off a cliff? He has this huge gash in his arm and
| he sews himself up. See, that's considered being a man._
|
| > _Tell you the truth, Matt, I find his movies
| simplistic. Why does everything have to be so complicated
| with you?_
|
| Later in the script the extraterrestrial references this
| in an unintentionally hilarious way, provoking a
| concerned response from IIRC his wife:
|
| > _If I wanted I could fall off a cliff and sew myself
| up._
|
| > _George, have you had your lead supplements today?_
|
| Aside from its lampshaded effect on popular US
| conceptions of masculinity in general, the _Rambo_
| fantasy seems to have been so popular among, uh, boys who
| like to cosplay as soldiers, that the knife featured in
| the movie became the dominant form of cosplay knife for
| many years, if we believe
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n3QiP5LNDE. Some poorly-
| thought-out regulation here in Argentina has criminalized
| the possession of knives made to look similar,
| specifically having a sawblade on the back.
|
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/FirstBlood198
| 2 discusses some of the popular literary tropes that
| appear in it, including "Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene"
| (which affected the popular perception of Vietnam
| veterans such as the fictional protagonist); "Affably
| Evil", in a context that some people think of whenever
| they hear about a police manhunt on the news; "Asshole
| Victim", in which the most unpleasant person
| coincidentally suffers great misfortune; "Break the
| Haughty", in which the arrogant sheriff turns out to be a
| coward; "Trauma Button", whose shallow depiction of PTSD
| was the pattern for the popular understanding of PTSD for
| many years; and of course "Invincible Hero".
|
| A lot of these are not "near-universal" in the sense of
| "applicable in nearly every situation", but they are
| "near-universal" in the sense that everybody has either
| seen the movie, or seen other movies made by people who
| were influenced by the movie, or heard stories from
| people who were influenced by one of those movies, etc.
|
| Some of them _are_ applicable in nearly every situation.
| Whenever someone thinks that bad things won 't happen to
| them because they're a nice person, for example, they're
| unconsciously believing in the puddle of ideas around
| "Asshole Victim", and _Rambo_ 's instance is just one
| drop of blood in that puddle. More insidiously, when
| people learn that someone has suffered misfortune,
| "Asshole Victim" subconsciously prompts them to search
| for reasons they deserved it.
|
| Of course it's easiest for me to identify the thought-
| patterns that result from tropes I dissent from, not the
| ones that reflect (as I misunderstand it) Reality.
| eszed wrote:
| No comment on the rest of the list, but anything by H. L.
| Mencken is likely to be a banger.
| kragen wrote:
| Yeah, it's probably more enjoyable than the rest of that
| list put together. Still, _prefaces_? Generally I try to
| _avoid_ reading those.
| inflames123 wrote:
| RIP
| kragen wrote:
| 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.
| benterix wrote:
| You got me curious about the leading zero.
| kragen wrote:
| 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.
| dkga wrote:
| I love how each HN post is a gateway to miscellaneous
| obscure knowledge with a technical point behind it
| casenmgreen wrote:
| I find it improper that we count from 2025 years ago.
|
| We should count from the beginning of time.
| thechao wrote:
| It's October 22, 14 billionish. Been that way for a
| while.
| daeken wrote:
| I've become an unironic proponent of HE, the Human Era.
| For CE dates, we just add 10000 (I'm writing this from
| 12025). But for BCE dates, they're subtracted and it
| makes things so much clearer when it comes to telling how
| long ago something was. E.g. the sundial was invented
| around 6000 HE, steel was developed around 9000 HE.
|
| Kurtzgesagt has a really great video about the subject:
| https://youtu.be/czgOWmtGVGs
|
| There's also a timeline in HE that covers many major
| historical events: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/71a711_
| 295e365a6ec64d6ca7f87e...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| It's better to call this Holocene Era even though
| Holocene didn't exactly start in 10,000 BCE, because
| modern humans were around for a long time prior to the
| 10,000 BCE epoch. Some people have proposed 8,000 BCE as
| an epoch, styling this "After the development of
| Agriculture". According to this epoch, we'd currently be
| in year 10025 A.D.A., which is neat.
| kragen wrote:
| An unfortunate suggestion of that nomenclature is that it
| suggests that "humanity" came into existence only 12025
| years ago, which would mean that the creatures before
| that time were all non-human. This is especially
| unfortunate given that it strongly implies that, for
| example, either Khoisan people, Australian people, or
| European people are human, but not more than one of the
| three, since they diverged genetically before that date.
| While, on one level, this is merely a semantic issue
| about the definition of the word "human", on another
| level it mirrors the ideological justifications for mass
| enslavement and genocide that caused historically
| unprecedented atrocities in the 20th century (unsurpassed
| until Mao surpassed them), because most people's ethical
| systems accord special privileges to "humans", for
| example holding that killing any number of nonhumans is
| justifiable if it saves even one human's life, or, in
| most cases, even if it merely provides them with meat to
| eat.
|
| While I don't believe the Kurzgesagt staff endorse
| genocide and cannibalism, I think they may not have
| clearly thought out the implications of their choice of
| terminology.
|
| Premack's timeline that you link does not make the same
| error, calling it the "Holocene Era", as Emiliani did.
| DannyBee wrote:
| My birthday was October 17th, 14000000005, but after some
| new physics estimates, it turns out it's really October
| 13th, 14000000008.
| armarr wrote:
| The time we will collectively waste for the next 8k years
| typing that extra 0 will not weigh up against the benefit.
| sangeeth96 wrote:
| There's an xkcd in the making here, if it doesn't exist
| already.
| imdsm wrote:
| Long term optimist perhaps
| rom1v wrote:
| Are the years intended to be read in octal?
| kijin wrote:
| According to javascript, 01971 is just 1971. Meanwhile, 01671
| is 953.
| kragen wrote:
| Man! JS never stops trolling you.
| drfuchs wrote:
| That's a ZipCode.
| nappy-doo wrote:
| It's one of these Long Now things. The goal is to get people
| to think in long term time frames.
| walkabout wrote:
| They're intended to derail every thread that includes them
| into discussions about this stupid date format, thus wasting
| lifetimes of person-hours.
|
| It's surely an effort by misanthropes who want the worst for
| humanity. If it's coming from any benign motivation, then
| it's totally misguided.
| ron_k wrote:
| Yes, the title has been changed. The one I posted clearly said
| "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation".
| kragen wrote:
| Can you change it back? Currently it says "Greg Newby, CEO of
| Project Gutenberg, has died," which seems to be misleading
| people.
| ron_k wrote:
| I can't, sorry, there's no edit button, I guess because of
| low karma. Maybe the mods (or who changed it) can revert it
| to the old title.
| kragen wrote:
| They seem to have done so now.
| sevensor wrote:
| 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.
| melling wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| melling wrote:
| 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.
| exhilaration wrote:
| 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.
| CaptainOfCoit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Definitely get a colonoscopy. Colon cancer is the one
| cancer you can detect before it's a problem. I felt a
| little dumb once I found out I waited a few years too
| long then needed surgery and chemo.
|
| That liquid biopsy should be used to detect the numerous
| other cancers.
| melling wrote:
| 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.
| boredhedgehog wrote:
| None of the cancer screening programs have been able to
| demonstrate an effect on life expectancy, neither
| colonoscopies nor mammographies.
| BeetleB wrote:
| 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...
| acabal wrote:
| 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.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Why are there no unique numbers assigned to Standard Ebook's
| ebooks? I understand that there is a cost associated with
| ISBNs, but it's very irritating to not have something that
| identifies them uniquely. Most (all?) aren't even in Worldcat,
| so I can't use OCLC numbers for that purpose either.
| testdelacc1 wrote:
| > very irritating
|
| I think it's possible to express this in a less caustic way.
| Because Standard E-books is high quality and free of charge
| right?
| aestetix wrote:
| Can we get a black bar for Dr. Newby?
| JoeMattie wrote:
| I am very sad to hear this. Greg was my mentor during my first
| internship at the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center in
| Fairbanks Alaska back in the very early 2000s.
| ethagnawl wrote:
| Greg Newby was also very actively involved in the production of
| the HOPE Conference. If there's a broadcast tonight, Off The Hook
| (AKA The Hacker Radio Show) show on WBAI (99.5 FM in NY) and
| wbai.org will almost certainly be in his honor.
|
| RIP
| castillar76 wrote:
| Genuinely saddened by this. I had Dr. Newby for a Linux admin
| class in college in the late 90s and it was one of the courses
| that got me interested in systems administration. I remember him
| as patient, kind, and enthusiastic about open-source and the
| possibilities Linux represented for changing the Internet.
| rsync wrote:
| If you are part of PG or closely related to Greg Newby I
| _strongly encourage_ you to email info@rsync.net at your earliest
| convenience.
|
| I will watch that inbox personally - please do be in touch as
| soon as possible.
|
| Please also accept my condolences and best wishes - I've known
| Greg since the earliest HOPE conventions.
| abawany wrote:
| I will cherish his email response to me when I emailed PG about a
| donation issue a few years ago and he helped resolve the
| situation. I remain grateful to PG for their amazing work. RIP
| Greg.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I did some volunteer work with/for Greg a lifetime. He will be
| missed, and the world is a better place due to his work.
| razeh wrote:
| I meet Greg when I was an undergraduate at Syracuse University
| and he was earning his PhD. I helped out a bit with some of the
| graphics programming for his thesis. Greg was a class act, always
| patient and kind. It was super helpful to me when I went to UIUC
| for graduate schools and he showed up as a faculty member there;
| he knew how to get access to campus resources and was more
| willing to help me than faculty in my own department. He was a
| model RIP.
| karambahh wrote:
| Met him at HAL 2001, volunteered together a bit there. I think
| he was heading the speakers herald team I was part of. First
| encounter with the hacker conference scene, he guided me
| wisely.
|
| Patient and kind indeed.
|
| He's the reason I kept going around European hacking / free
| software events. I owe him cultural discoveries, long lasting
| friendships and tech partnerships. Very saddened by this news.
|
| So far the thread is full of similar interactions with him.
|
| That person changed so many lives, by his contributions to
| culture and technology but more importantly (?) because he had
| tremendous impacts on the lives of many people he took time to
| interact with.
|
| I know that these threads are always full of "this recently
| deceased people made the world a better place". I lived with
| him 4 days 24 years ago so I can't say I knew him...but I know
| I wouldn't be writing this about more "famous" people I
| interacted with.
|
| So long, and thanks for all the fish.
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