Greg Newby @ Project Gutenberg: The Professor Who Gives Away Books

"My interests were never purely on the technology side, it was always on the side of what technology helps us understand about ourselves and each other. And so when it came to learning about ebooks, there’s kind of an obvious interest, like, wow, not only can I read a book on a computer, which at that time I didn’t do a whole lot of, I was still reading print books for the most part. But to me, it was more important that the knowledge in a book or the words in a book could become easily available to me much more easily on a computer. And by going down to the library or working on a bookshelf, sort of, I want to know something that might be in a thesaurus that I can use on the online thesaurus. I can use the online CIA Factbook and other bunch of reference materials that were digitized in early days.

These days, we were mostly doing fiction and nonfiction, but not so much reference materials back then reference materials for a big deal or something that I just wanted to remind myself of or remind myself of the passage from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Well, that’s a lot easier to do. It’s a text file on your computer, you have to search for some text using a word processor or a Linux grep command or what have you. Then it is to find a book and then page through the book.

So I think we felt the need of ebooks was to see how the utility of an ebook matched in most ways that of a printed book with the limitations that were a big deal back then, like you’re not going to have a network and a computer, on the beach or in the bathtub or something. So you’re limited in some ways, but match in terms of the words on the page, a printed book, and, more importantly, exceed what you could do with a printed book...."