Apprendo solo ora, casualmente e con evidente ritardo, della morte di Greg Newby, fondatore del Project Gutenberg, la più grande biblioteca digitale ad accesso gratuito del mondo.
Questa comunicazione, non rivestendo più carattere di attualità, desidera solo esprimere ringraziamento a questo brav’uomo hce tanto ha fatto per la cultura libera.
Di seguito il comunicato ufficiale in inglese del Project Gutenberg.
October 21, 2025: We said goodbye to our smart, kind, generous, wonderful friend and longtime leader, Greg Newby. The family wishes that in lieu of flowers or anything else, donations can be made to Project Gutenberg in Greg’s name.
Gregory B. Newby, PhD, MBA, MA, was a Fourth Industrial Revolution visionary whose life was dedicated to blending cutting-edge science and information technology with civic mindedness and community organizing. Dr. Newby was an internationally recognized expert and published author who delivered keynote presentations, participated on panels, and contributed papers to conference proceedings while editing volumes in the fields of information retrieval and visualization, grid computing, and supercomputing. He spent decades combining professional activities with philanthropic work, from expanding global literacy to rescuing sled dogs to growing the hacking community to benefit the social good with Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE).
Dr. Newby became the first CEO and Director of Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (PGLAF) in 2000 after serving as a volunteer since 1991 alongside Founder Michael Hart. During his tenure as CEO, Newby greatly increased the size and diversity of Project Gutenberg’s collection, winning multiple awards for innovations including fostering distributed proofreading and novel text-to-speech technologies while increasing advocacy for minimal restriction, open-access digital libraries.
Project Gutenberg won the Stockholm Challenge Award in 2002 for its significant role in expanding global literacy, emphasizing community participation to address the digital divide. The Tech Museum of Innovation (now The Tech Interactive) awarded PGLAF in 2003 for leveraging information technology to benefit humanity. Newby presented “Forty-Five Years of Digitizing eBooks: Project Gutenberg’s Practices” at the Literature Translation Institute of Korea in 2016, which was compiled into a free e-book.
In 2023, TIME Magazine recognized Project Gutenberg’s Open Audiobook Collection as “one of the best inventions” for its role in addressing global challenges and improving society, highlighting its state-of-the-art technology that converted almost 5,000 public domain works into free audiobooks made available on the Internet Archive and various streaming services. The software developed in collaboration with Microsoft and MIT was released at no cost, furthering Project Gutenberg’s mission to “continuously improve methods for creating and distributing” free access to literature. The BBC interviewed Newby in 2025 regarding Project Gutenberg’s impact and legacy on world history.
While serving as CEO of Project Gutenberg, Newby’s career spanned the public and private sectors as well as academia. He served in key leadership roles at the Yukon Government, Compute Canada, the Supercomputing Core at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), and the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) before serving on the faculties at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science. He began his career at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he co-founded Prairienet, a pioneering community internet network launched in 1993, and authored Directory of Directories on the Internet: A Guide to Information Sources (Westport: Meckler, 1994), helping to make the early internet more navigable in the early Information Age.
Dr. Newby earned his BA in Communication and Psychology (1987) and MA in Communication (1988) from the State University of New York at Albany and completed his Ph.D. in Information Transfer at Syracuse University in 1993, He received an MBA and a graduate certificate in Sustainable Energy Systems in 2014 from Bainbridge Graduate Institute.
In his leisure time, Newby participated in endurance races on foot and dog sled. He resided in Whitehorse, Yukon with his wife, where she still runs StinkyPup Kennel and cares for 24 Alaskan huskies (and one pit bull).
His personal homepage remains at petascale.org. Read the obituary in The Globe and Mail
Text and photo on his page are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 International license.
