Do you own an ebook reader or love to read ebooks from our Overdrive media collection?  Then you owe a degree of thanks to Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg and widely credited with being the person who uploaded the very first ebook.  Hart passed away Tuesday at his home in Urbana, IL.  Hart's connection to Illinois goes back a long way.  It was on July 4, 1971 that he typed the full Declaration of Independence into a Univ. of Illinois mainframe computer, effectively the world's first ebook.  He continued to add books and encourage others to help him, leading to Project Gutenberg.   Since then, it has grown to a collection of over 36,000 ebooks, all free to view!  You can search it directly, or discover titles from it (and other free ebook projects) through the "Search the Databases" box on our Databases page.