10/22/2025
October 21, 2025: We say goodby to our smart, kind, generous, wonderful friend and longtime leader, Greg Newby. More updates tomorrow.
Greg Newby Gregory B. Newby, PhD, MBA, MA, is a Fourth Industrial Revolution visionary whose life has been dedicated to blending cutting-edge science and information technology with civic mindedness and community organizing. Dr. Newby is an internationally recognized expert and published author who has 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 has 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 has 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 has spanned the public and private sectors as well as academia. He has 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.
