A Short History of EBooks Part 1

A Short History of EBooks.

by Marie Lebert.

INTRODUCTION

The book is no longer what it used to be.

The electronic book (ebook) was born in 1971, with the first steps of Project Gutenberg, a digital library for books from public domain. It is nearly 40 years old, already. But this is a short life compared to the 5-century old print book.

The internet went live in 1974, with the creation of the protocol TCP/IP by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn. It began spreading in 1983 as a network for research centers and universities. It got its first boost with the invention of the web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, and its second boost with the release of the first browser Mosaic in 1993. From 1994 onwards, the internet quickly spread worldwide.

In Bookland, people were reluctant, curious or pa.s.sionate.

The internet didn't bring print media, movies, radio or television to an end. It created its own s.p.a.ce as a new medium, to get information, access doc.u.ments, broaden our knowledge and communicate across borders and languages.

Booksellers began selling books online within and outside their home country, offering excerpts on their websites.

Libraries began creating websites as a "virtual" window, as well as digital libraries stemming from their print collections. Librarians helped patrons to surf on the web without being drowned, and to find the information they needed at a time search engines were less accurate. Library catalogs went online. Union catalogs offered a common point for hundreds and then thousands of catalogs.

Newspapers and magazines began being available online, as well as their archives. Some journals became "only" electronic to skip the costs of print publis.h.i.+ng, while offering print on demand. Some newsletters, zines and journals started online from scratch, skipping a print version.

Authors began creating websites to self-publish their work or post it while waiting to find a publisher. Communication with readers became easier through email, forums, chat and instant messaging. Some authors explored new ways of writing, called hypertext literature.

More and more books were published with both a print version and a digital version. Some books were "only" digital. Other books were digitized from print versions.

New online bookstores began selling "only" digital books.

Aggregators partnered with publishers to produce and sell digital versions of their books.

People no longer needed to run after information and to worry about living in a remote place with no libraries and bookstores. Information was there, by the numbers, available on our screen, often at no cost.

In 2009, most of us would not be able to work, study, communicate and entertain without connecting with others through the internet.

Here is the "virtual" journey we are going to follow:

1971: Project Gutenberg is the first digital library 1990: The web boosts the internet 1993: The Online Books Page is a list of free ebooks 1994: Some publishers get bold and go digital 1995: Amazon.com is the first main online bookstore 1996: There are more and more texts online 1997: Multimedia convergence and employment 1998: Libraries take over the web 1999: Librarians get digital 2000: Information is available in many languages 2001: Copyright, copyleft and Creative Commons 2002: A web of knowledge 2003: eBooks are sold worldwide 2004: Authors are creative on the net 2005: Google gets interested in ebooks 2006: Towards a world public digital library 2007: We read on various electronic devices 2008: "A common information s.p.a.ce in which we communicate"

Unless specified otherwise, quotations are excerpts from NEF interviews .

1971: PROJECT GUTENBERG IS THE FIRST DIGITAL LIBRARY

= [Overview]

The first ebook was available in July 1971, as eText #1 of Project Gutenberg, a visionary project launched by Michael Hart to create electronic versions of literary works and disseminate them worldwide. In the 16th century, Gutenberg allowed anyone to have print books for a small cost. In the 21st century, Project Gutenberg would allow anyone to have a digital library at no cost. Its critics long considered Project Gutenberg as impossible on a large scale. But Michael went on keying book after book during many years, with the occasional help of some volunteers. Project Gutenberg got its first boost with the invention of the web in 1990 and its second boost with the creation of Distributed Proofreaders in 2000, to help digitizing books from public domain. In 2008, Project Gutenberg had a production rate of 340 new books each month, 40 mirror sites worldwide, and books being downloaded by the tens of thousands every day. There have been Project Gutenberg websites in the U.S, in Australia, in Europe and in Canada, with more websites to come in other countries.

= From 1971 until now

# Beginning

As recalled by Michael Hart in January 2009 in an email interview: "On July 4, 1971, while still a freshman at the University of Illinois (UI), I decided to spend the night at the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the UI Materials Research Lab, rather than walk miles home in the summer heat, only to come back hours later to start another day of school. I stopped on the way to do a little grocery shopping to get through the night, and day, and along with the groceries they put in the faux parchment copy of 'The U.S. Declaration of Independence'

that became quite literally the cornerstone of Project Gutenberg. That night, as it turned out, I received my first computer account - I had been hitchhiking on my brother's best friend's name, who ran the computer on the night s.h.i.+ft. When I got a first look at the huge amount of computer money I was given, I decided I had to do something extremely worthwhile to do justice to what I had been given. This was such a serious, and intense thought process for a college freshman, my first thought was that I had better eat something to get up enough energy to think of something worthwhile enough to repay the cost of all that computer time. As I emptied out groceries, the faux parchment Declaration of Independence fell out, and the light literally went on over my head like in the cartoons and comics... I knew what the future of computing, and the internet, was going to be... 'The Information Age.' The rest, as they say, is history."

Michael decided to search the books from public domain available in our libraries, digitize these books, and store the electronic books (ebooks) in the simplest way, using the low set of ASCII - called Plain Vanilla ASCII - for them to be read on any hardware and software. A book would become a continuous text file instead of a set of pages, with caps for the terms in italic, bold or underlined of the print version. As a text file, a book would be easily copied, indexed, searched, a.n.a.lyzed and compared with other books. (Doing such searches is much harder in various markup formats.)

Project Gutenberg's mission would be the following: to put at everyone's disposal, in electronic versions, as many literary works from public domain as possible for free. Years later, in August 1998, Michael wrote in an email interview: "We consider etext to be a new medium, with no real relations.h.i.+p to paper, other than presenting the same material, but I don't see how paper can possibly compete once people each find their own comfortable way to etexts, especially in schools."

After keying in "The U.S. Declaration of Independence" in 1971, Michael typed in "The U.S. Bill of Rights" in 1972. A volunteer typed in "The United States Const.i.tution" in 1973.

# Persevering

From one year to the next, disk s.p.a.ce was getting larger, by the standards of the time - there was no hard disk yet -, making it possible to store larger files. Volunteers began typing in the Bible, with one individual book at a time, and a file for each book. Michael typed in the collected works of Shakespeare, with the help of volunteers, one play at a time, and a file for each play. This edition of Shakespeare was never released, unfortunately, due to changes in copyright law.

Shakespeare's works belong to public domain, but comments and notes may be copyrighted, depending on the publication date.

Other editions of Shakespeare from public domain were posted a few years later.

# 10 to 1,000 ebooks

In August 1989, Project Gutenberg completed its 10th ebook, "The King James Bible" (1769), both testaments, and 5 M for all files.

In 1990, there were 250,000 internet users. The web was in its infancy. The standard was 360 K disks.

In January 1991, Michael typed in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (1865), by Lewis Carroll. In July 1991, he typed in "Peter Pan" (1904), by James M. Barrie. These two cla.s.sics of childhood literature each fit on one disk.

The first browser, Mosaic, was released in November 1993. It became easier to circulate etexts and recruit volunteers. From 1991 to 1996, the number of ebooks doubled every year, with one book per month in 1991, two books per month in 1992, four books per month in 1993, and eight books per month in 1994.

In January 1994, Project Gutenberg released "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare" as eBook #100. Shakespeare wrote most works between 1590 and 1613.

The steady growth went on, with an average of 8 books per month in 1994, 16 books per month in 1995, and 32 books per month in 1996.

In June 1997, Project Gutenberg released "The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood" (1883), by Howard Pyle.

Project Gutenberg had 1,000 ebooks in August 1997. eBook #1000 was "La Divina Commedia" de Dante Alighieri (1321), in Italian, its original language.

As there were more and more ebooks, they got cla.s.sified in three main sections: (a) "Light Literature", such as "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", "Through the Looking-Gla.s.s", "Peter Pan" and "Aesop's Fables"; (b) "Heavy Literature", such as the Bible, Shakespeare's works, "Moby d.i.c.k" and "Paradise Lost"; (c) "Reference Literature", such as "Roget's Thesaurus", almanacs, and a set of encyclopedias and dictionaries. (This cla.s.sification in three sections was replaced later with a more detailed one.)

"Light Literature" was the main section in number of ebooks. As explained on the website in 1998, "The Light Literature Collection is designed to get persons to the computer in the first place, whether the person may be a pre-schooler or a great-grandparent. We love it when we hear about kids or grandparents taking each other to an etext of 'Peter Pan' when they come back from watching Hook at the movies, or when they read 'Alice in Wonderland' after seeing it on TV. We have also been told that nearly every Star Trek movie has quoted current Project Gutenberg etext releases (from 'Moby d.i.c.k' in 'The Wrath of Khan'; a Peter Pan quote finis.h.i.+ng up the most recent, etc.) not to mention a reference to 'Through the Looking-Gla.s.s'

in JFK. This was a primary concern when we chose the books for our libraries. We want people to be able to look up quotations they heard in conversation, movies, music, other books, easily with a library containing all these quotations in an easy-to- find etext format."

Project Gutenberg has selected books intended for the general public. It has not focused on providing authoritative editions.

"We do not write for the reader who cares whether a certain phrase in Shakespeare has a ':' or a ';' between its clauses.

We put our sights on a goal to release etexts that are 99.9% accurate in the eyes of the general reader. Given the preferences our proofreaders have, and the general lack of reading ability the public is currently reported to have, we probably exceed those requirements by a significant amount.

However, for the person who wants an 'authoritative edition' we will have to wait some time until this becomes more feasible.

We do, however, intend to release many editions of Shakespeare and the other cla.s.sics for comparative study on a scholarly level."

In August 1998, Michael Hart wrote in an email interview: "My own personal goal is to put 10,000 etexts on the net [this goal was reached in October 2003] and if I can get some major support, I would like to expand that to 1,000,000 and to also expand our potential audience for the average etext from 1.x% of the world population to over 10%, thus changing our goal from giving away 1,000,000,000,000 etexts to 1,000 times as many, a trillion and a quadrillion in U.S. terminology."