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 website: “For those of you not acquainted with the zine world, ‘zine’ is short for either ‘fanzine’ or ‘magazine’, depending on your point of view. Zines are generally produced by one person or a small group of people, done often for fun or personal reasons, and tend to be irreverent, bizarre, and/or esoteric. Zines are not ‘mainstream’ publications — they generally do not contain advertisements (except, sometimes, advertisements for other zines), are not targeted towards a mass audience, and are generally not produced to make a profit. An ’e-zine’ is a zine that is distributed partially or solely on electronic networks like the internet.”
The Etext Archives
The Etext Archives were founded in 1992 by Paul Southworth, and hosted on the website of the University of Michigan. They were “home to electronic texts of all kinds, from the sacred to the profane, and from the political to the personal”, without judging their content.
There were six sections in 1998: (a) “E-zines”: electronic periodicals from the professional to the personal; (b) “Politics”: political zines, essays, and home pages of political groups; (c) “Fiction”: publications of amateur authors; (d) “Religion”: mainstream and off-beat religious texts; (e) “Poetry”: an eclectic mix of mostly amateur poetry; and (f) “Quartz”: the archive formerly hosted at quartz.rutgers.edu.
“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 was published in 1963 by ANSI (American National Standards Institute). The 7-bit plain ASCII, also called Plain Vanilla ASCII, is a set of 128 characters with 95 printable unaccented characters (A-Z, a-z, numbers, punctuation and basic symbols), the ones that are available on the American / English keyboard.
With computer technology spreading outside North America, the accented characters of several European languages and characters of some other languages were taken into account from 1986 onwards with 8-bit variants of ASCII, also called extended ASCII, that provided sets of 256 characters.
Brian King, director of the WorldWide Language Institute (WWLI), explained in September 1998: “Computer technology has traditionally been the sole domain of a ’techie’ elite, fluent in both complex programming languages and in English — the universal language of science and technology. Computers were never designed to handle writing systems that couldn’t be translated into ASCII. There wasn’t much room for anything other than the 26 letters of the English alphabet in a coding system that originally couldn’t even recognize acute accents and umlauts — not to mention non-alphabetic systems like Chinese. But tradition has been turned upside down. Technology has been popularized. (…)
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" followed by a date, then title, and each post includes a link to the next essay in the series, along with a link back to this TOC.
A couple of days ago Marie Lebert released her 40 Years of Project Gutenberg mini guide. Hundreds of people have already downloaded the guide and for those who are seeking a more in-depth review on the history of the ebook, then you’re in luck as Marie will be sharing more articles over the coming weeks.
This series of articles marks the very end of a 12-year (1999-2011) research project, which has involved over 100 people world-wide. They all shared their experiences about the way the internet and digital technology has changed the book field across borders and languages. There’s also many references to little-known projects along the way. These are going to be a real treat for all e-bookworms.
40 years ago there was only one eBook on the Internet that you could download, and the operators were resistant to an additional eBook being added more than once a year, and it had to be a short one, given the space and bandwidth.
From 1971 to 1976 it was an uphill struggle for permission to put The U.S. Constitution online as an eBook because it was so much larger than all the previous eBooks, but it is still standing as one of the great early Net achievements, not only because it was larger than previous ones but also because the person who made it available was anonymous and remained so in spite of all of my efforts to locate and to send my thanks.
40 years ago…one title available at Project Gutenberg.
Today…one hundred thousand titles available at PG, and 2.1 million available at The World Public Library, and 2.9 million at The Internet Archive, 1.6 million at Wattpad. That’s 6.7 million just off the top of my head and without adding in all of the Google eBooks, which is hard to do as Google doesn’t have an index for counting eBooks.
As today marks the 40th anniversary of Project Gutenberg we have a special ebook gift for all our volunteers and visitors. Marie Lebert and friends have put together a mini picture guide on the history of Project Gutenberg; from the founding of the project by Michael Hart, to the first native French ebook, the inauguration of the Distributed Proof-readers, to the posting of ebook #30,000.
This is a PDF ebook and contains 15 pages of images, each accompanied with a short text covering the main milestones throughout PG’s 40 year history.
In an unprecedented move, Michael Hart, the inventor of eBooks, has announced he will buy lunch for anyone who can find errors, to the tune of one per chapter [10K of text] in the flagship of eBooks, The Alice in Wonderland Stories.
This includes the two books that are often portrayed together: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, by Charles Dodgson [Lewis Carroll]
The requirements are simply that one downloads the latest eBook versions from Project Gutenberg, and email them to Prof. Hart, so he can verify that you are working from the proper edition.
If you can find as much as one error per chapter or the 10,000 letter/character equivalent, Prof. Hart will drive to Chicago, Indianapolis or St. Louis, or nearby locations to be agreed on, to buy you lunch at Chicago’s Giordano’s Pizza, or King’s BBQs in Indianapolis. A St. Louis primary location not yet chosen.
There are three times as many ereader devices now than just a single year ago, and Amazon has just announced that their own eBooks now have eight authors selling over a million eBooks.
Of course, this is a million eBooks total, none of the eBooks are million sellers on their own, while sites such as Project Gutenberg, The World Public Library, and The Internet Archive have each had a number of “million seller eBooks” if you will allow that term for non-profit organizations.
The first World eBook Fair, just a handful of years ago, gave out a million copies of “Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen, in just a single month, well before Amazon’s Kindle came out, or Apple’s iPad, or any of the revolutionary devices that are now powering the world of commercial eBooks.
This Monday, the Fourth of July, marks large 40th Anniversary celebrations around the world of the first eBook that started as a simple snowball, as it were, turning into an avalanche.
Today marks the fourth anniversary of the launch of Project Gutenberg Canada on July 1st 2007.
We launched PG Canada to give Canadians full access to online versions of works in our public domain that are under copyright in other countries, notably the United States and the European Union. These countries have foolishly extended their copyright durations; Canada has defended its citizens’ ownership of the public domain by leaving copyright durations largely untouched. The range of our titles reflects this.
Come join the celebration, “It’s the Year of the eBook!”
We should be adding thousands of books, new and old, to the following libraries every single day for an entire month of July 4 to August 4, 2011 at our 6th annual World eBook Fair.
All are welcome!
We will have three eLibraries each with over a million books: