Long before you had a computer on your desk, way back in 1971, a college student named Michael Hart began making works of literature available in electronic form. His goal? To create an online repository of useful books the public could download free of charge some day. He named his endeavor Project Gutenberg, after the German who invented the revolutionary idea of movable type printing. His first e-book was the Declaration of Independence. Now, thanks to an international community of volunteers, Project Gutenberg has more than 24,000 items in its collection, which grows each week by an average of 50 new e-books. You won’t find the latest bestsellers at the site, because they’re copyright protected, but a quick tour of the online book catalog allows you to search for whatever you desire — by author, title or language. The database is updated nightly, so you can browse “recent” additions or yesterday’s “Top 100 Books.” What might you find? Because all of the books must be in the public domain, there are novels by Jane Austen (pictured), Jules Verne and Charles Dickens, as well as classics like The Art of War by Sunzi, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis and Homer’s The Iliad. The titles can be used on almost any computer and everyone is invited to contribute books and participate in enlarging the archive. You can even do some proofreading, even as little as one scanned page per day. Other “products” available at Project Gutenberg include audio books, CDs, DVDs and digitized sheet music. Visit soon and remind yourself that it’s visionaries such as Michael Hart that made the web a revolutionary force of, for and by the people.