eBooks: 2000 – The web portal yourDictionary

History
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Five years before co-founding yourDictionary.com in February 2000, as the portal for all languages without any exception, Robert Beard created the website A Web of Online Dictionaries (WOD) in 1995. Robert Beard was a language teacher at Bucknell University, in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. In September 1998, his website provided an index of 800 online dictionaries in […]

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eBooks: 1999 – The internet as a novel character

History
eBooks: 1999 - The internet as a novel character

The internet is one of the characters of Alain Bron’s second novel, “Sanguine sur toile”, available in print from Le Choucas in 1999, and in PDF from 00h00 in 2000. This novel won the Lions Club International Prize in 2000. About the novel Alain Bron wrote in November 1999 in an email interview: “In French, […]

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eBooks: 1999 – The Ulysses Bookstore on the web

History
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Founded in 1971 by Catherine Domain in Paris, France, Librairie Ulysse (Ulysses Bookstore) is the oldest bookstore in the world dedicated only to travel. The bookstore launched its website in 1999 and a small publishing venture in 2010. Nested on Ile Saint-Louis surrounded by the river Seine, Librairie Ulysse has offered 20,000 books, maps and […]

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eBooks: 1999 – Librarians in cyberspace

History
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To help their patrons deal with the internet, to select and organize information for them, to create and maintain websites, to check specialized databases and to update online catalogs became daily tasks for librarians. Here are two examples, with Peter Raggett at the Central Library of OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) and Bruno […]

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eBooks: 1998 – The first ebook readers

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How about a book-sized electronic device that could store many books at once? The first ebook readers were the Rocket eBook and the SoftBook Reader, launched in Silicon Valley in 1998. These dedicated electronic readers were the size of a (large and thick) book, with a battery, a black and white LCD screen, and a […]

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eBooks: 1998 – The Electronic Beowulf Project

History
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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 […]

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eBooks: 1997 – A portal for European national libraries

History
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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 […]

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eBooks: 1997 – Multimedia convergence

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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 […]

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eBooks: 1996 – Towards a digital knowledge

History
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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 […]

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eBooks: 1995 – Libraries launched websites

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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 […]

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eBooks: 1993 – PDF, from past to present

History
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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 […]

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