Michael Hart was the founder of Project Gutenberg, an online library of over 45,000 e-books that are out of copyright. You may think making books available to the public at the click of a mouse an interesting career choice for a man who was dyslexic!
theguardian.com
Hart was raised in Washington in the 1950s. His parents were codebreakers during World War II, which is interesting because the dyslexic mind is often gifted in this area – perhaps he inherited his particular dyslexic genius from them! Although he struggled with literacy in school, from a young age he was advanced in mathematics and technology.
He graduated from university in just 2 years, majoring in his self-designed subject, “man-machine interfaces”. It was during this time that his life-long passion was born: he wanted to create a universal, open-access digital library, which would later become Project Gutenberg.
Today, Project Gutenberg is a vast repository of free e-books, the largest archive of its kind in the entire world.
You can read more about his amazing life and energizer-bunny attitude toward fulfilling his dream here: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/esgutenberg.html
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Sarah Forrest is a Reading Specialist for Oxford Learning Solutions, publishers of the Easyread System. Easyread is a leading online program for children with dyslexia, highly visual learning styles, and more. www.easyreadsystem.com
