Michael Stern Hart (March 8, 1947 – September 6, 2011) was an
American author, best known as the inventor of the
electronic book (or ebook) and the founder of
Project Gutenberg (PG), the first project to make ebooks freely available via the
Internet. He published ebooks years before the Internet existed via the
ARPANET, and later on
BBS networks and
Gopher servers.