Project Gutenberg CEO Greg Newby during a race in Haliburton, Ont. He died in Whitehorse earlier this month at the age of 60, after a brief battle with pancreatic cancer.Ilana Kingsley./Supplied
Greg Newby was eight years old when he wrote a letter to Santa Claus and finished it with a simple request: “Make sure other people get things too.”
It was that spirit of generosity that drove Mr. Newby throughout his life as he helped spearhead one of the most significant public service projects in modern internet history: Project Gutenberg, a massive online library of more than 75,000 free, public domain texts.
Mr. Newby died in Whitehorse on Oct. 21 at the age of 60, after a brief battle with pancreatic cancer. He is remembered by his colleagues at the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the non-profit overseeing the Project Gutenberg collection, as a “Fourth Industrial Revolution visionary,” who helped marshal the chaotic, creative forces of the early internet to help serve the public interest.
“His greatest qualities lay in his sincerity, humility and gentleness,” said Alexander Urbelis, a panelist on hacker magazine 2600’s Off the Hook podcast, which dedicated an episode to Mr. Newby. “I’m just so grateful that he was with us for so long.”
Gregory Barton Newby was born in Montreal on Feb. 9, 1965, to Linda and Neville Newby. His father remembers him as an avid reader, “even before he knew what words were.” In grade school, after the family relocated to New York, he found he had often already read the books teachers assigned – so he would assign himself others, such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
Mr. Newby at a HOPE conference.Emmanuel Goldstein/Supplied
Mr. Newby soon developed a taste for science fiction, which he continued reading avidly throughout his life. But it was real emerging science that caught his interest while pursuing degrees in communication and psychology at Syracuse University, where he also met his wife, Ilana Kingsley. His PhD explored issues surrounding electronic communication, focusing on the social science of the early internet.
During his first teaching job at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he pioneered an early internet network, PrairieNet. Launched in 1994, the network granted a free login to all Illinois residents, and became a major information hub for the state through much of the 1990s. He soon after authored an influential early guide to navigating the chaos of early internet directories.
But it was his chance encounter with Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, that was most consequential. Mr. Newby had been interested in e-books since he first received a digital edition of Alice in Wonderland, in 1987. “I immediately realized what a tremendous thing that was,” he told the BBC in a recent documentary. But it was Mr. Hart’s vision of a massive, free public domain library that enticed Mr. Newby to volunteer with the project beginning in 1991.
Mr. Newby quickly became “undoubtedly the most consequential volunteer” in the history of the project, according to Simon Rowberry, a historian and author of The Early Development of Project Gutenberg, c.1970-2000. “Hart was sort of this crazy visionary, not really good on the organizational side,” said Eric Hellman, acting CEO of PGLAF since Mr. Newby’s death. “Greg stepped in and provided the organization … it really needed to still be around today.”
In 2000, Mr. Newby became CEO of the newly formed PGLAF, and accelerated the work of the project. As a founding trustee of the Distributed Proofreaders Foundation, formed in 2006, he helped co-ordinate a massive network of volunteer editors to help clean up the text in scans of public domain works. “It was remarkable how he was able to attract volunteers,” Mr. Hellman said.
Mr. Newby soon earned a reputation for being a steady hand, always willing to collaborate and help. “He was … unbelievably patient with me, some guy he had never heard of or met before,” said Alex Cabal, founder of a company, Standard Ebooks, that worked with Project Gutenberg to improve the quality of e-books in the public domain. “We should all aspire to his high spirit of camaraderie, charity and kindness.”
Throughout this time, Mr. Newby was also becoming a fixture of the hacker community. “Hackers can be good or hackers can be evil,” Ms. Kingsley, his wife, said, “and he was the ‘hackers could be good’ part.”
In 2000, he became involved with Hackers on Planet Earth, a conference series in New York for which he soon became a principal organizer. Between sessions headlined by the likes of American whistle-blower Edward Snowden and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, he “often serv[ed] as stage manager while decked out in anything from a zoot suit to a graduation gown,” according to 2600 magazine.
Mr. Newby used his own speaking slots at the conference to advocate for a “hacker code of ethics.”
“Hackers are potentially one of the most powerful forces … to help bring about social change,” he wrote in a 2000 presentation. “The problem is, hackers are by their nature not very organized, and often don’t even recognize themselves for what they are.”
In a particularly prescient 2002 follow-up, he argued for “information ethics” education in public schools, from teaching Grade 5 students to question whether “a computer is always right,” to encouraging Grade 10 students to ask questions about privacy, misinformation and the commodification of data.
The following year, Mr. Newby relocated to the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he soon swapped his massive collection of science fiction books for a collection of altogether different type: retired sled dogs. Always animal lovers, Mr. Newby and Ms. Kingsley already owned five dogs when they moved into a house with eight retired huskies onsite. “All of a sudden, we had 13 dogs,” Ms. Kingsley recalls.
Mr. Newby during a 100-mile dog sled race in Dawson City, Yukon. His family says he looked after more than 80 dogs over his lifetime.Sebastian Schnuelle/Supplied
“At first … we had a ‘no more than seven dogs in the house’ rule,” she said. But Mr. Newby could not resist a puppy dog stare, sneaking more and more dogs into the house while Ms. Kingsley was away. “Soon, we had 16 dogs in the house.” His family says he cared for more than 80 dogs over his lifetime.
Mr. Newby’s time in the North also saw him develop his passion for outdoor pursuits, nurtured throughout a childhood of family camping trips and Boy Scout excursions. While he participated in his first ultramarathon as early as 1998, he later competed in several 100-mile sled races and Arctic ultramarathons – resulting in frostbite to his toes.
Mr. Newby cycled through several other jobs in his last few years: a stint at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, where he oversaw the purchase of a $100-million supercomputer; a role with Compute Canada, a national research group; and finally, a period as eServices manager at the Government of Yukon. He and Ms. Kingsley have called an off-grid cabin on the shore of Lake Laberge their home for the past five years.
But this remoteness did not isolate him from the community of internet pioneers he had helped nurture. On message boards across the internet, news of his passing was greeted with great sadness by former students and collaborators, who admired his stoic nature and steady leadership.
His final years with Project Gutenberg saw the pioneering use of new artificial intelligence technology to convert thousands of public domain texts into audiobooks, in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Microsoft. The technology was made publicly available, for free. In 2023, Time magazine named it one of the best inventions of the year.
Mr. Newby expressed some skepticism about the direction of technology in his final years. At Wired Next Fest, in 2021, he said, “Today, the internet experience is more like shopping.” But he maintained there was powerful potential in new internet and AI tools to advance “one of [its] original missions.”
For Mr. Newby, that mission had always been clear: as he wrote on his own website, to “build things, in order to enhance our information commons … then … to give those things away.”
Mr. Newby leaves his parents, Linda and Neville Newby; his siblings, Jodi Thomas, P.K. Newby, and Todd Newby; and his wife, Ilana Kingsley.
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