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