You sully Michael's memory with this uninformed misrepresentation. It's even worse that you infer people like me should stop doing something to help put literature in people's hands. As you are well aware, the answer to ideas like this was always, "yes." It was Michael's own idea to have a corner of everyone's cell phone or similar device have a small personal collection of literature. That is the specific thing I'm trying to make easier, by making it simple to have a starter collection. Among other things, this approach Michael encouraged was intended to make sure people had their own personal copies, to do with as they pleased. He was not a cloud enthusiast, and preferred people to have their own copies of eBooks, rather than rely on copies on a server somewhere. There are plenty of people doing things to keep the Project Gutenberg effort going. If your only contribution is to tell people that they're doing it wrong, you can imagine for yourself what Michael's reaction would have been. -- Greg On Fri, Sep 06, 2013 at 03:27:55PM -0400, bowerbird wrote:
it's just been 2 years, to the day, since michael passed away.
plus, in 2 more days, it would have been his "half-birthday".
so it seems kind of ironic that y'all seem to have forgotten one of his most important points -- unlimited distribution.
i guess it gives you a kind of thrill to play "master curator", making your lists -- "top 100", "best shakespeare", etc. -- but as one can put tens of thousands of e-books on a d.v.d., and have the whole library as close as an internet connection, it's obvious that kind of thinking belonged to the last century.
which is the prescient vision michael had _4_decades_ back.
so while you guys are discussing what the best restaurant is, michael hart is busy at the heavenly buffet, sampling all of it, heaping big piles of _everything_ on his tray, and _loving_ it.
and lest you think your esoteria denotes that you're cultured, let me remind you that it wasn't that michael hart lacked taste.
when i was with him at his local buffet, he insisted to a waitress that she replace a glass of water another waiter had given me, saying "he filled it from the spigot by the yogurt machine, and everyone knows that that spigot gives the water a rusty taste". well, that waitress just gave us a wry smile, one that imparted that while this regular _might_ be a slight pain in the rear-end, she did acknowledge that he knew what he was talking about.
and it wasn't just in the buffet either; it was the library as well.
heck, he could argue the merits of any number of classic books. and that's because he _recognized_ those merits, and decided to focus on the strong points of each, and not on the weak ones.
you wanna argue about versions of shakespeare?
michael was raised by parents who did that at the breakfast table.
so go ahead and pick your "top 100".
but michael would never be bothered with such patent nonsense, as he was busy distributing trillions of books to billions of people.
_unlimited_distribution._ one of michael's most important points.
-bowerbird
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