#Founder of The On-Line Books Page, listing freely-available online books
The On-Line Books Page lists over 12,000 freely-available online books in
English. It was founded in 1993 by John Mark Ockerbloom, who the same year
started the website of the CMU CS (Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science).
In 1998, John graduated from Carnegie Mellon (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) with a
Ph.D. in computer science. He has now moved to Penn (University of
Pennsylvania), where he works with the library and the computer science
department doing digital library research and development. The On-Line Books
Page also joined Penn's digital library, and John hopes it can be greatly
expanded and upgraded while being integrated with other digital library
resources.
*Interview of September 2, 1998
= How did your website begin?
I was the original Webmaster here at CMU CS, and started our local Web in 1993.
The local Web included pages pointing to various locally developed resources,
and originally The On-Line Books Page was just one of these pages, containing
pointers to some books put online by some of the people in our department.
(Robert Stockton had made Web versions of some of Project Gutenberg's texts.)
After a while, people started asking about books at other sites, and I noticed
that a number of sites (not just Gutenberg, but also Wiretap and some other
places) had books online, and that it would be useful to have some listing of
all of them, so that you could go to one place to download or view books from
all over the Net. So that's how my index got started.
I eventually gave up the webmaster job in 1996, but kept The On-Line Books Page,
since by then I'd gotten very interested in the great potential the Net had for
making literature available to a wide audience. At this point there are so many
books going online that I have a hard time keeping up (and in fact have a large
backlog of books to list). But I hope to keep up my online books works in some
form or another.
= How do you see the future?
I am very excited about the potential of the Internet as a mass communication
medium in the coming years. I'd also like to stay involved, one way or another,
in making books available to a wide audience for free via the Net, whether I
make this explicitly part of my professional career, or whether I just do it as
a spare-time volunteer.
*Interview of August 5, 1999
= What do you think of the debate about copyright on the Web?
I'm not sure which debate you have in mind. But I think it's important for
people on the Web to understand that copyright is a social contract that's
designed for the public good -- where the public includes both authors and
readers.
This means that authors should have the right to exclusive use of their creative
works for limited times, as is expressed in current copyright law. But it also
means that their readers have the right to copy and reuse the work at will once
copyright expires. In the US now, there are various efforts to take rights away
from readers, by restricting fair use, lengthening copyright terms (even with
some proposals to make them perpetual) and extending intellectual property to
cover facts separate from creative works (such as found in the "database
copyright" proposals). There are even proposals to effectively replace copyright
law altogether with potentially much more onerous contract law. I find it much
harder to sympathize with MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) head Jack
Valenti's plea to stop copying of copyrighted movies when I know that if he had
his way, *no* movie would ever enter the public domain. (Mary Bono mentioned
this wish of his in Congress last year.)
If media companies are seen to try to lock up everything that they can get away
with, I don't find it surprising that some consumers react by putting on-line
anything *they* can get away with. Unfortunately, doing that in turn takes away
the legitimate rights of authors.
How to practically solve this? Stakeholders in this debate have to face reality,
and recognize that both producers and consumers of works have legitimate
interests in their use. If intellectual property is then negotiated by a balance
of principles, rather than as the power play it's too often ends up being ("big
money vs. rogue pirates") we may be able to come up with some reasonable
accommodations.