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 digital culture was changing the way both teachers and students were seeing teaching and learning. Print culture provided “stable” information whereas digital culture provided “moving” information.
During a conference organized by the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) in September 1996, Dale Spender, a professor and researcher, gave a lecture on “Creativity and the Computer Education Industry”, with insightful comments on forthcoming trends. Here are some excerpts:
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 by automation, computers, and all other forms of the twentieth-century gadgetry.”
Automation and computers were followed by the internet (1974) and the web (1990), and eased the work of librarians in some way.
The Helsinki City Library in Finland was the first library to launch a website, which went live in February 1994. Other libraries started their own websites as a virtual window for their patrons and beyond. Patrons could check opening hours, browse the online catalog, and surf on a broad selection of websites on various topics.
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 world. Individuals, businesses, and government agencies everywhere trust and rely on Adobe PDF to communicate their ideas and vision.”
As the “veteran” format, PDF was perfected over the years as a global standard for distribution and viewing of information. Acrobat Reader and Adobe Acrobat gave the tools to create and view PDF files in several languages and for several platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux).
In August 2000, Adobe bought Glassbook, a software company intended for publishers, booksellers, distributors and libraries. Adobe also partnered with Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com to offer ebooks for Acrobat Reader and Glassbook Reader.
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 University (CMU, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania).
Five years later, in September 1998, John Mark wrote: “I was the original webmaster here at CMU CS, and started our local web in 1993. The local web included pages pointing to various locally developed resources, and originally The Online Books Page was just one of these pages, containing pointers to some books put online by some of the people in our department. (Robert Stockton had made web versions of some of Project Gutenberg’s texts.) After a while, people started asking about books at other sites, and I noticed that a number of sites (not just Gutenberg, but also Wiretap and some other places) had books online, and that it would be useful to have some listing of all of them, so that you could go to one place to download or view books from all over the net. So that’s how my index got started.
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.