I stumbled upon Project Gutenberg a few years ago and considered it an ingenious idea. Project Gutenerg is a web site dedicated to providing free and royalty-free electronic books. Instead of making a trip to the library or ordering from Amazon, you can download the classics to your computer's hard drive.

The site and its creator were featured in Saturday's Wall Street Journal:

Internet giants like Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. are making headlines with their rival plans to create online libraries of books. Long before those companies even existed, though, there was Project Gutenberg: an ambitious, offbeat effort to digitize classic books by typing them out by hand.

The approach made a lot of sense back in 1971, when Project Gutenberg's founder Michael Hart was a student at the University of Illinois. He enlisted an army of volunteers to help in the effort, by pulling their own dusty volumes from attic shelves and transcribing them, word for word. The electronic versions were sent to Mr. Hart, who stored them on clunky university computers. Nearly 35 years later, Project Gutenberg has put more than 17,000 so-called e-books on its Web site. It continues to add more titles each week — though most texts are now scanned rather than typed.

Excellent idea. Whatever makes it easier for people to gain access to great books is a good thing. Although Google is in the book-scanning business now, little guys like Hart are still providing a valuable and necessary service.

Related: The Death of Traditional Book Publishing