JOHN MARK OCKERBLOOM (Pennsylvania)
#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.