History

eBooks: 1998 – The Electronic Beowulf Project

Thumbnail image for eBooks: 1998 – The Electronic Beowulf Project

The British Library began offering digitized versions of its treasures, for example Beowulf, the earliest known narrative poem in English and one of the most famous works of Anglo-Saxon poetry. The British Library holds the only known manuscript of Beowulf, dated circa 1000. The poem itself is much older than the manuscript  — some historians […]

Read the full article →

eBooks: 1997 – A portal for European national libraries

Thumbnail image for eBooks: 1997 – A portal for European national libraries

Gabriel — an acronym for “Gateway and Bridge to Europe’s National Libraries” — was launched in January 1997 as a common portal giving access to the internet services of the participating libraries. As stated on its website: “Gabriel also recalls Gabriel Naudé, whose ‘Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque’ (Paris, 1627) is one of the earliest […]

Read the full article →

eBooks: 1997 – Multimedia convergence

Thumbnail image for eBooks: 1997 – Multimedia convergence

Previously distinct information-based industries, such as printing, publishing, graphic design, media, sound recording and film making, were converging into one industry, with information as a common product. This trend was named multimedia convergence, with a massive loss of jobs, and a serious enough issue to be tackled by the International Labor Organization (ILO). A symposium […]

Read the full article →

eBooks: 1996 – Towards a digital knowledge

Thumbnail image for eBooks: 1996 – Towards a digital knowledge

The information available in books is “static”, whereas the information available on the internet is regularly updated, thus the need to change our relationship to knowledge. In 1996, more and more computers connected to the internet were available in schools and at home. Teachers began exploring new ways of teaching. Going from print culture to […]

Read the full article →

eBooks: 1995 – Libraries launched websites

Thumbnail image for eBooks: 1995 – Libraries launched websites

In the mid-1990s, libraries started their own websites as a virtual window for their patrons and beyond, with an online catalog and a digital library. In his book “Books in My Life”, published by the Library of Congress in 1985, Robert Downs, a librarian, wrote: “My lifelong love affair with books and reading continues unaffected […]

Read the full article →

eBooks: 1993 – PDF, from past to present

Thumbnail image for eBooks: 1993 – PDF, from past to present

From California, Adobe launched PDF (Portable Document Format) in June 1993, along with Acrobat Reader (free, to read PDFs) and Adobe Acrobat (for a fee, to make PDFs). As stated on the website, PDF “lets you capture and view robust information from any application, on any computer system and share it with anyone around the […]

Read the full article →

eBooks: 1993 – The Online Books Page

Thumbnail image for eBooks: 1993 – The Online Books Page

In 1993, John Mark Ockerbloom created The Online Books Page as “a website that facilitates access to books that are freely readable over the internet.” The web was still in its infancy, with Mosaic as its first browser. John Mark Ockerbloom was a graduate student at the School of Computer Science (CS) of Carnegie Mellon […]

Read the full article →

eBooks: 1992 – Homes for electronic texts

Thumbnail image for eBooks: 1992  – Homes for electronic texts

The first homes for electronic texts were the Etext Archives, founded in 1992 by Paul Southworth, and the E-Zine-List, founded in 1993 by John Labovitz, among others. The first electronic texts were mostly political. They were followed by electronic zines, that also covered cultural topics. What exactly is a zine? John Labovitz explained on its […]

Read the full article →

eBooks: 1991 – From ASCII to Unicode

Thumbnail image for eBooks: 1991 – From ASCII to Unicode

“English is no longer necessarily the lingua franca of the user. Perhaps there is no true lingua franca, but only the individual languages of the users.” (Brian King) Used since the beginning of computing, ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a 7-bit coded character set for information interchange in English (and Latin). It […]

Read the full article →

eBooks: 1971-2011 TOC

Thumbnail image for eBooks: 1971-2011 TOC

After 12 years of research involving more than one hundred people, Marie Lebert has posted English translations of her work on 40 years of eBooks. To help you navigate through the series we’ve created this post to act as the Table of Contents for the articles. Each essays title is prefixed with the word “eBooks” […]

Read the full article →

Distributed Proofreaders Celebrates 10th Anniversary

Distributed Proofreaders (thumbnail)

Project Gutenberg was launched by Michael Hart in July 1971 to create free electronic versions of literary works and disseminate them worldwide. The project 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. […]

Read the full article →