In 1971, Michael Hart invented the eBook and founded Project Gutenberg in one stroke. Now he wants to give away 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 eBooks. That’s one quintillion eBooks. And he’s sure it can actually be done.

In his keynote address at Hackers On Planet Earth on Saturday, Hart said that Project Gutenberg, which gives away free eBooks to anyone who wants them, is doubling in size about every 18 months, despite critics’ claims that it will never succeed.

Hart, who admits he is not good at programming, nevertheless had to figure out what to do with computer time donated to him by the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois. He said that he finally realized that computers would be most valuable as information storage and retrieval devices, and long before it had ever been named, created and uploaded his first eBook to the Internet, then a very tiny network connecting a few universities.

“I actually tried to e-mail the Declaration of Independence to all 100 people on the Internet, which would have killed it,” he said.

The project now claims over 18,000 eBooks online, with new public domain works added to its collection daily. It even occasionally gets permission from authors to redistribute copyrighted works noncommercially. Conference attendees received a DVD containing about 20,000 eBooks, some of them copyrighted, with instructions to copy and give away copies of the DVD, but not to sell them.

Now Hart wants to expand Project Gutenberg into developing countries.

“I want to jack up the literacy rate,” Hart said, “to build a better world from the bottom up, not from the top down.”

But the expansion of copyright is Hart’s enemy in his quest to bring free information to as many people as possible.

“One hundred years ago half of all copyrights had expired,” he said. “One hundred years from now 99.99% of everything copyrighted will still be under copyright.”

Hart explained the world has gone through five information ages, beginning with the invention of the Gutenberg printing press in 1450, and that each has been followed by copyright laws which were designed to restrict the free (or at least cheap) flow of information to the masses.

“The original copyright was created specifically to stifle the Gutenberg press,” he said. “Every one of these information ages was countered by a copyright to stop them from giving information to everyone in the world.”

Nevertheless, restricted to public domain works and those works whose authors grant Project Gutenberg a license to distribute them noncommercially, Hart is confident of the long-term success of Project Gutenberg.

And to create that success, the project releases most of its eBooks in plain text and HTML formats, because virtually every computer which has ever existed can read at least plain text. “I double dog dare you to find one computer that won’t read our books,” he said.

“I’m thinking about how all this is going to look 1,000 years from now, or 100,000 years from now.” Which is why the project is experimenting with new formats, such as XML, a source document format from which many other types of formats, such as plain text, HTML, PDF and many others, can be generated. This would let readers choose the format they prefer from a single file download.

And in celebration of Project Gutenberg’s 35th anniversary, the World eBook Fair is giving away free eBooks (it’s normally a paid service) through August 4.

Literacy is the first step on the road to freedom. The more people take that step, the more people have a chance to realize their dreams. Download and share an eBook today. Or a few thousand.