Oct. 1, 2002, Room 116, Motel 6, Rock Springs, Wyo.

Kahle has been trying to turn the Internet into a digital library since 1988, when he started work on WAIS (Wide Area Information Servers), a pre-Web system for searching through large collections of text. At WAIS, Kahle brought the New York Times, Dow Jones, and Encyclopædia Britannica to the Net. After selling WAIS Inc. to AOL, he started Alexa Internet, which used a browser widget to collect user traffic patterns and recommend sites based on those patterns, and the Internet Archive, which aims to keep a copy of everything ever posted to the Web. (Alexa was sold to Amazon in 1999 while the Archive continued as a nonprofit.)

Since 1996, the Archive has been crawling the Web and collecting all of it. So far, Kahle has collected over 100 terabytes of Web. Earlier this year, Kahle traveled to Alexandria, Egypt, to present the Egyptian government with a copy of the Archive. "Mrs. Mubarak was grateful for the donation of 100 terabytes of Web, 3,000 hours of Egyptian and U.S. government television, 1,000 movies, and a book-scanning facility," Kahle says as we sip motel plastic cups of single malt scotch. "Then she said, 'But I love my books.' This woman has started more libraries than Carnegie. At that moment, I realized, if I wanted to build a digital library, the Web would not be enough. We need to do books. You can't build a library without books."

In fact, Kahle has been broadening the Archive's collections since early this year. Besides the Web, the Internet Archive hosts a collection of television coverage of Sept. 11, 1,200 ephemeral films from the Prelinger Archives, Project Gutenberg, etree.org's archives of live concert performances by the likes of Dave Matthews and String Cheese Incident, and an archive of more than 8,000 CD-ROMs donated by Macromedia.

Why add all these other collections to the Internet Archive? Kahle says he was motivated by a paper prepared for the Library of Congress called "Why Archive the Web?" The paper found that the Internet is the "information resource of first resort" for millions of readers, Kahle says. "I found this exciting and frightening. A hundred million searches happen every day by tens of millions of users. But the Net doesn't have the best we have to offer."

Oct. 3, Urbana, Ill., home of Michael Hart

For hundreds of years, we have put the best of our culture in books. And while the authors of the Constitution offered "limited" protection to authors, they were clearly interested in enriching the public domain. The copyright term was originally set for 14 years, renewable for another 14 years, with the condition that the work be submitted to the Library of Congress. Congress has extended the copyright term 11 times in the past 40 years.

"Universal access to human knowledge is what we as a culture and as parents need to do, and we're screwing up. Ninety-eight percent of all books are inaccessible to my child for any amount of money," Kahle says, as we pull into Urbana, Ill. Ninety-eight percent of all books in copyright are "terminally" out of print, according to estimates by Lawrence Lessig, professor of law at Stanford University and lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the Eldred case. Universal access to human knowledge? The law is designed to prevent access to knowledge -- at least the human knowledge that no longer earns its keep in bookstores and movie theaters.

If the Supreme Court upholds Sonny Bono, it will leave the door open for Congress to perpetually extend copyright. If that happens, it is reasonable to assume that no more works will ever enter the public domain. Even if the court finds against the law, the decision wouldn't change the fundamental fact that new works automatically enter this super-lengthy copyright protection.

While the future of the public domain is on trial in Washington, digital librarians aren't exactly uploading works in the public domain at a blistering speed. There are around 20,000 books online for free downloading. The Library of Congress contains 26 million volumes. Michael Hart started Project Gutenberg over 30 years ago by keyboarding public-domain books by hand. Today he has over 100 volunteers around the world and 6,000 books online. He hopes to hit 10,000 books by the end of 2003.

Kahle wants to pay a surprise visit to Hart, the patron saint of online books, since Urbana is on the way to our next destination. When we arrive at his house, there is a car parked in the driveway but no other signs of life. A sign on the front door says "RING BELL LOUD. RING AGAIN. PAUSE. THEN RING AGAIN." Following these directions yields no response. Peering in through the front door window, Kahle utters a low, "Wow, this place is amazing."

Art Medlar calls Hart on his cell phone. "Michael Hart? We have a delivery for you."

"What is it?"

"It's a bookmobile."

"Oh cool, I'll be right there."

After posing for a few publicity shots at the wheel of the bookmobile, Hart reluctantly lets us into his house but forbids picture-taking. In his cave of a basement office, the green characters of a VT100 monitor glow out from a mountain of papers and books. On a shelf above his desk sit boxed sets of ancient WordPerfect manuals. Half a dozen or so clocks line his desk. Reaching for a magazine article to show Kahle, he upsets a precariously balanced monitor stand on which stacks of papers sit. "Uh, oh. This is a problem, this is a big problem!" He finally finds a copy of Windows for Dummies and props the shelf up before disaster strikes. Pointing to a mattress he keeps in the office, Hart explains that it's not uncommon for him to fall asleep at the keyboard, so the mattress saves him the trouble of negotiating his way to his bedroom in a stupor. "One day I got up before the sun came up. I came down here to work and by the time I went back upstairs it was night. I missed the entire day. So I have all these clocks to remind me to take a break."

Michael Hart is one of those people who straddle the line between visionary genius and obsessive nutcase. "You know that episode of "Star Trek," when they look in the computer to find some 20th century book that tells them what to expect when they go back in time," Hart says. "How do you think those books got in the computer? That's me."

"I have an ulterior motive in dropping by," Kahle announces. "I want to convince you to drive this buggy around the country next year."

"Oh, man, I am so busy. I can't do anything until 2004. I'm on the final leg of a 30-year marathon. I can't do anything until I get 10,000 books."

"If I get you your books, will you go?" Kahle prods.

"Yes, if you get me to 10,000 books, I'll drive your buggy to all 50 states. After that, I'll go to 50 countries!"

"Great. You'll get your books."

Mission accomplished, sort of, the bookmobile heads on to Columbus.

Recent Stories