Project Gutenberg's Booknology: The eBook (1971-2010), by Marie Lebert

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Title: Booknology: The eBook (1971-2010)

Author: Marie Lebert

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BOOKNOLOGY: THE EBOOK (1971-2010)



MARIE LEBERT


From 1971 to 2010 > Booknology, an ebook timeline

The electronic book (ebook) was born in 1971, as eText #1 from Project
Gutenberg, a visionary project founded by Michael Hart to freely
disseminate literary works electronically. It is nearly 40 years old, a
short life compared to the 5-century old print book. In March 2010,
there are ten million freely available books from public domain on the
internet, that is to say 40% of the 25 million books from public domain
(without counting various editions). Recent books can now be bought
from digital bookstores, and read on computers, smartphones and ebook
readers. [Please forgive my mistakes in English, if any. My mother
tongue is French.]

July 1971 > The Project Gutenberg, a visionary project

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 2009, Project Gutenberg had a collection of 30,000 ebooks,
38 mirror sites worldwide, and books being downloaded by the tens of
thousands every day.

1974 > The Internet

When Project Gutenberg began in July 1971, the Internet was just a
glimmer. The pre-internet was created in the U.S. In 1969, as a network
set up by the Pentagon. The internet took off in 1974 with the creation
of TCP/IP by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn. It expanded as a network linking
U.S. Governmental agencies, universities and research centers. 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.  The Internet Society was founded in 1992 by Vinton Cerf to
promote the development of the internet, that was quickly spreading
worldwide to become part of our lives.

1977 > ASCII extensions

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. It was published in 1968 by ANSI
(American National Standards Institute), with an update in 1977 and
1986. 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 English/American keyboard. With the use of other European
languages, extensions of ASCII (also called ISO-8859 or ISO-Latin) were
created as sets of 256 characters to add accented characters as found
in French, Spanish and German, for example ISO 8859-1 (ISO-Latin-1) for
French.

1977 > UNIMARC, a common bibliographic format

The IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations) published
the first edition of UNIMARC: Universal MARC Format in 1977, followed
by a second edition in 1980 and a UNIMARC Handbook in 1983. UNIMARC
(Universal Machine Readable Cataloging) was set up as a solution to the
20 existing national MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) formats. 20
formats meant lack of compatibility and extensive editing when
bibliographic records were exchanged. With UNIMARC, catalogers would be
able to process records created in any MARC format. Records in one MARC
format would first be converted into UNIMARC, and then be converted
into another MARC format. UNIMARC would also be promoted as a format on
its own.

1984 > The copyleft

The term "copyleft" was invented in 1984 by Richard Stallman, a
computer scientist at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), who
launched the GNU project to develop a complete Unix-like operating
system called the GNU system. As explained on the GNU website:
"Copyleft is a general method for making a program or other work free,
and requiring all modified and extended versions of the program to be
free as well. (...) Copyleft says that anyone who redistributes the
software, with or without changes, must pass along the freedom to
further copy and change it. Copyleft guarantees that every user has
freedom. (...) Copyleft is a way of using of the copyright on the
program. It doesn't mean abandoning the copyright; in fact, doing so
would make copyleft impossible. The word 'left' in 'copyleft' is not a
reference to the verb 'to leave' -- only to the direction which is the
inverse of 'right'. (...) The GNU Free Documentation License (FDL) is a
form of copyleft intended for use on a manual, textbook or other
document to assure everyone the effective freedom to copy and
redistribute it, with or without modifications, either commercially or
non commercially."

1984 > The Psion Organiser, first electronic agenda

Launched in 1984 by the British company Psion, the Psion Organiser is
the first electronic agenda. Later on, Psion launched the Psion Series
3 and Series 5, and the company expanded internationally. In 2000, the
various models (Series 7, Series 5mx, Revo, Revo Plus) compete with the
Palm Pilot and the Pocket PC, with fewer sales. The company decided to
diversify its activities. Following the acquisition of Psion Teklogix,
Psion Teklogix was created in September 2000 to develop wireless mobile
solutions for businesses. Psion Software was founded in 2001 to develop
software for the new generation of mobile devices using the Symbian OS
platform, for example the smartphone Nokia 9210, launched the same year.

1986 > Franklin launched dictionaries on handheld machines

Franklin, a company based in New Jersey (United States), launched in
1986 the first dictionary available on a handheld machine. Fifteen
years later, Franklin distributed 200 reference books on handheld
machines: monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, encyclopedias,
Bibles, textbooks, medical books and books for entertainment.

1990 > The World Wide Web

The World Wide Web was invented in 1989-90 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN
(European Center for Nuclear Research), Geneva, Switzerland. In 1989,
Tim Berners-Lee networked documents using hypertext. In 1990, he
developed the first HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) server and the
first web browser. In 1991, the Web was operational and radically
changed the way people were using the internet. Hypertext links can now
move from a textual or visual document to another one using a simple
mouse click. While becoming interactive, information became more fun to
use. Later on, this interactivity was further enhanced with hypermedia
links that could link texts and images with graphics, video or music.
The World Wide Web Consortium was founded in October 1994 to develop
protocols for the web.

January 1991 > Unicode, an encoding for all languages

First published in January 1991, Unicode "provides a unique number for
every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the
program, no matter what the language" (excerpt from the website). This
double-byte platform-independent encoding provides a basis for the
processing, storage and interchange of text data in any language, and
any modern software and information technology protocols. Unicode is
maintained by the Unicode Consortium, with its variants UTF-8 (UTF:
Unicode Transformation Format), UTF-16 and UTF-32, and is a component
of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) specifications. In 2008, 50% of
all the documents available on the internet were encoded in Unicode,
with the other 50% still encoded in ASCII, a 7-byte or 8-byte encoding
dating back from 1968.

January 1993 > The Online Books Page, a list of free ebooks

Founded in 1993 by John Mark Ockerbloom while he was a student at
Carnegie Mellon University (in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), The Online
Books Page is "a website that facilitates access to books that are
freely readable over the internet. It also aims to encourage the
development of such online books, for the benefit and edification of
all." John Mark Ockerbloom first maintained this page on the website of
the School of Computer Science of Carnegie Mellon University. In 1999,
he moved it to its present location at the University of Pennsylvania
Library, where he is a digital library planner and researcher. The
Online Books Page offered links to 12,000 books in 1999, 20,000 books
in 2003 (including 4,000 books published by women), 25,000 books in
2006, 30,000 books in 2008, and 35,000 books in 2010. The books "have
been authored, placed online, and hosted by a wide variety of
individuals and groups throughout the world", with a number of books
from Project Gutenberg. The FAQ also gives copyright information about
most countries in the world with links to further reading.

June 1993 > Acrobat Reader and the PDF format

Adobe launched PDF (Portable Document Format) in June 1993, with
Acrobat Reader (free, to read PDF documents) and Adobe Acrobat (for a
fee, to make PDF documents). As the "veteran" format, PDF was perfected
over the years as a global standard for distribution and viewing of
information. It "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"
(excerpt from the website). Adobe Acrobat gave the tools to create and
view PDF files, for a number of languages and platforms (Windows, Mac,
Linux). The Acrobat Reader was available for PDAs, beginning with the
Palm Pilot (May 2001) and the Pocket PC (December 2001). Between 1993
and 2003, over 500 million copies of Acrobat Reader were downloaded
worldwide. In 2003, Acrobat Reader was available in many languages and
for many platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Palm OS, Pocket PC, Symbian
OS, etc.). Approximately 10% of the documents on the internet were
available in PDF.

July 1993 > The E-zine-list

What exactly is a zine? John Labovitz, founder of the E-zine-list in
1993, explained on his website: "'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. (...) An 'e-zine' is a zine that is distributed partially or
solely on electronic networks like the internet." 3,045 e-zines were
listed in November 1998, with e-zines spreading like fire. "Even the
term 'e-zine' has been co-opted by the commercial world, and has come
to mean nearly any type of publication distributed electronically. Yet
there is still the original, independent fringe, who continue to
publish from their heart, or push the boundaries of what we call a
'zine'."

November 1993 > Mosaic, the first public browser

Developed by the NSCA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications)
at the University of Illinois (USA) and distributed free of charge from
November 1993, Mosaic was the first browser for the general public and
contributed greatly to the  development of the web. In early 1994, part
of the Mosaic team migrated to the Netscape Communications Corporation
to develop a new software called Netscape Navigator. In 1995, Microsoft
launched Internet Explorer as a competitor.  Other browsers, like Opera
or Safari. This photo from Wikipedia shows Mosaic 3.0 for Windows.

February 1994 > The first library website

The first library website was the one created by the Helsinki City
Library in Finland, which went live in February 1994. From then on,
more and more traditional libraries had a website as a new "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. Libraries developed digital libraries alongside their
standard collections, for a large audience to be able to access their
specialized, old, local and regional collections, including images and
sound. Librarians could now fulfill two goals that used to be in
contradiction--preservation (on shelves) and communication (on the
internet). Library treasures went online, like Beowulf, the earliest
known narrative poem in English, dated circa 1000, or the original
Bible from Gutenberg, dated 1455, on the website of the British Library.

May 1994 > The Human-Languages Page

Created by Tyler Chambers in May 1994, the Human-Languages Page (H-LP)
was a comprehensive catalog of 1,800 language-related internet
resources in 100 languages. In September 1998, there were six subject
listings and two category listings. The six subject listings were:
languages and literature, schools and institutions, linguistics
resources, products and services, organizations, jobs and internships.
The two category listings were: dictionaries, and language lessons. In
spring 2001, the Human-Languages Page merged with the Languages
Catalog, a section of the WWW Virtual Library, to become
iLoveLanguages, In September 2003, iLoveLanguages provided an index of
2,000 linguistic resources in 100 languages.

1994 > Athena, a multilingual digital library

Athena was founded in 1994 by Pierre Perroud, a Swiss teacher, and
hosted on the website of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Athena
is a multilingual digital library specializing in philosophy, science,
literature, history and economics, either by digitizing documents or by
providing links to existing etexts. The Helvetia section has provided
documents about Switzerland. Geneva being the main city in
French-speaking Switzerland, Athena has also focused on putting
French-language texts online. A specific page has offered an extensive
selection of other digital libraries worldwide, with relevant links.

1994 > NAP used the web as a marketing tool

NAP (National Academy Press) was the first publisher in 1994 to post
the full text of some books, for free, with the authors' consent, and
to use the web as a marketing tool to sell print versions. NAP was
created by the National Academy of Sciences to publish its own reports
and the ones of the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of
Medicine, and the National Research Council. In 1994, NAP was
publishing 200 new books a year in science, engineering, and health.
Oddly enough, there was no drop in sales--on the contrary, sales
increased. In 1998, the new new NAP Reading Room offered 1,000 entire
books, available online for free in various formats: "image" format,
HTML format and PDF format.

1995 > The MIT Press followed the NAP

In 1995, MIT Press was publishing 200 new books per year and 40
journals, in science and technology, architecture, social theory,
economics, cognitive science, and computational science. MIT Press also
decided to put a number of books online for free, as "a long-term
commitment to the efficient and creative use of new technologies".
Sales of print books with a free online version increased. These
initiatives were praised by other publishers, but they were reluctant
to launch a similar experience because of the cost of posting online
thousands of pages, problems linked to copyright, and free versions
"competing" with print sales.

1995 > The Internet Dictionary Project

Tyler Chambers created the Human-Languages Page in May 1994. Tyler's
other language-related project was the Internet Dictionary Project
(IDP), launched in 1995. The IDP was a collaborative project to set up
free online dictionaries for French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese
and Spanish.  Tyler ran out of time to manage this project, and removed
the ability to update the dictionaries in January 2007. People can
still search the available dictionaries or download the archived files.

1995 > NetGlos, a collaborative glossary

Launched in 1995 by the WorldWide Language Institute (WWLI), an
institute providing language instruction via the web, NetGlos (which
stands for: Multilingual Glossary of Internet Terminology) has been
compiled as a voluntary, collaborative project by a number of
translators and other language professionals. In September 1998,
NetGlos was available in the following languages: Chinese, Croatian,
English, Dutch/Flemish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Maori,
Norwegian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

1995 > The Ethnologue: Languages of the World, on the web

Published by SIL International (SIL was initially known as the Summer
Institute of Linguistics) since 1951, and freely available on the web
since 1995, "The Ethnologue: Languages of the World" is an encyclopedic
reference work cataloging all of the world's 6,909 known living
languages. The 16th edition was published in 2009, in print and on the
web. The Ethnologue has been an active research project for more than
fifty years. Thousands of linguists have contributed to the Ethnologue
worldwide. A new edition is published approximately every four years.

1995 > The print press went online in the U.S.

The first electronic versions of print newspapers were available in the
early 1990s through commercial services like America Online and
CompuServe. In 1995, newspapers and magazines began offering websites
with a partial or full version of their latest issue, available freely
or through subscription (free or paid), as well as online archives. For
example, the site of The New York Times site could be accessed free of
charge, with articles of the print daily newspaper, breaking news
updated every ten minutes, and original reporting only available
online. The site of The Washington Post gave the daily news online,
with a full database of articles, with images, sound and video. The
computer press went logically online as well, first the monthly Wired,
created in 1992 in California to cover cyberculture as "the magazine of
the future at the avant-garde of the 21st century", then ZDNet, as a
leading computer online magazine.

1995 > The print press went online worldwide

In United Kingdom, for example, the daily Times and the Sunday Times
set up a common website called Times Online, with a way to create a
personalized edition. The weekly publication The Economist went online,
as well as the weekly Le Monde Diplomatique and daily Le Monde and
Liberation in France, the daily El Pais in Spain, and the weekly Focus
and Der Spiegel in Germany.

July 1995 > Amazon.com

The online bookstore Amazon.com was launched by Jeff Bezos in July
1995, in Seattle, on the West coast of the U.S., after a market study
which led him to conclude that books were the best products to sell on
the internet. When Amazon.com started, it had 10 employees and a
catalog of 3 million books. Unlike traditional bookstores, Amazon
doesn't have windows looking out on the street and books skillfully
lined up on shelves or piled upon displays. The "virtual" windows are
its webpages, with all transactions made through the internet. Books
are stored in huge storage facilities before being put into boxes and
sent by mail. In November 2000, Amazon had 7,500 employees, a catalog
of 28 million items, 23 million clients worldwide and four subsidiaries
in United Kingdom (launched in August 1998), Germany (August 1998),
France (August 2000) and Japan (November 2000). A fifth subsidiary
opened in Canada in June 2002, and a sixth subsidiary, named Joyo,
opened in China in September 2004.

December 1995 > The Kotoba Home Page, for a multilingual web

Yoshi Mikami, a computer scientist at Asia Info Network in Fujisawa,
Japan, launched in December 1995 the website The Languages of the World
by Computers and the Internet, also known as the Logos Home Page or
Kotoba Home Page. (The website was updated until September 2001.) Yoshi
was also the co-author (with Kenji Sekine and Nobutoshi Kohara) of The
Multilingual Web Guide (Japanese edition), a print book published by
O'Reilly Japan in August 1997, and translated in 1998 into English,
French and German.

March 1996 > The Palm Pilot was the first PDA

Palm, a company based in California, launched the Palm Pilot in March
1996, as the first PDA, and sold 23 million machines between 1996 and
2002. Its operating system was the Palm OS and its reading software the
Palm Reader. In March 2001, Palm users could also use the Mobipocket
Reader, and Palm bought Peanutpress.com, a company specializing in
digital books for PDA, with its Peanut Reader and 2,000 titles that
were transferred to Palm's digital bookstore, called Palm Digital
Media. While some book professionals were concerned about the small
screen, Palm users reading on their screens found it was fun.

April 1996 > The Internet Archive

Founded in April 1996 by Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive is a
non-profit organization that has built an "internet library" to offer
permanent access to historical collections in digital format for
researchers, historians and scholars. An archive of the web is stored
every two months or so. In late 1999, the Internet Archive started to
include more collections of archived webpages on specific topics. It
also became an online digital library of text, audio, software, image
and video content. In October 2001, with 30 billion stored webpages,
the Internet Archive launched the Wayback Machine, for users to be able
to surf the archive of the web by date. In 2004, there were 300
terabytes of data, with a growth of 12 terabytes per month. There were
65 billion webpages (from 50 million websites) in 2006, 85 billion
webpages in 2008 and 150 billion webpages in March 2010.

April 1996 > OneLook Dictionaries

Robert Ware launched his website OneLook Dictionaries in April 1996 as
a "fast finder" in hundreds of online dictionaries. On September 2,
1998, the fast finder could "browse" 2,058,544 words in 425
dictionaries covering various topics: business, computer/internet,
medical, miscellaneous, religion, science, sports, technology, general,
and slang. OneLook Dictionaries was provided as a free service by the
company Study Technologies, in Englewood, Colorado. OneLook
Dictionaries could browse 2,5 million words from 530 dictionaries in
2000, and 5 million words from 910 dictionaries in 2003.

Mai 1996 > DAISY, a standard for digital audiobooks

Founded in May 1996, the DAISY Consortium (DAISY meant: Digital Audio
Information System, before meaning: Digital Accessible Information
System) is an international consortium responsible for the transition
from analog audiobooks (on tapes or cassettes) and digital audiobooks.
Its task was to define an international standard, set up the conditions
for the production exchange and use of audiobooks, and organize the
digitization of audiobooks worldwide. The DAISY standard is based on
the DTB (Digital Talking Book) format, which allows the indexing of
audiobooks with bookmarks for paragraphs, pages and chapters, to make
it easier to navigate through the books.

October 1996 > The @folio project

The @folio project is a reading device conceived in October 1996 by
Pierre Schweitzer, an architect-designer living in Strasbourg, France.
It is meant to download and read any text and/or illustrations from the
web or hard disk, in any format, with no proprietary format and no DRM
(Digital Rights Management). The technology of @folio is novel and
simple. It is inspired from fax and tab file folders. The flash memory
is "printed" like Gutenberg printed his books. The facsimile mode is
readable as is for any content, from sheet music to mathematical or
chemical formulas, with no conversion necessary, whether it is
handwritten text, calligraphy, free hand drawing or non-alphabetical
writing. An international patent was filed in April 2001. The French
start-up iCodex was created in July 2002 to promote, develop and market
@folio.

1996 > Merriam-Webster Online

Merriam-Webster, a main publisher of English-language dictionaries,
launched the website Merriam-Webster Online: The Language Center in
1996 to give free access to online resources stemming from its print
publications. Among the online resources: Webster Dictionary, Webster
Thesaurus, Webster's Third (a lexical landmark), Guide to International
Business Communications, Vocabulary Builder (with interactive
vocabulary quizzes), and the Barnhart Dictionary Companion (hot new
words). The goal has also been to help track down definitions,
spellings, pronunciations, synonyms, vocabulary exercises, and other
key facts about words and language.

1996 > A main French-language dictionary online

The Dictionnaire Universel Francophone en Ligne (Universal
French-Language Online Dictionary) was the web version of the
Dictionnaire Universel Francophone, published by Hachette, a major
French publisher, and the AUPELF-UREF (that became the AUF: Agence
Universitaire de la Francophonie - University Agency of Francophony).
The dictionary included not only standard French but also the
French-language words and expressions used worldwide. French is the
official language of 49 states, with a number of them in Africa, and is
spoken by 500 million people worldwide. The AUF is a branch of the
Agence de la Francophonie (Agency of French-speaking Countries),
founded in 1970 as an instrument of multilateral cooperation at the
international level. As a side remark, English and French are the only
official and/or cultural languages that are widely spread on five
continents.

1996 > Digitalization

"Digitalization has made it possible to create, record, manipulate,
combine, store, retrieve and transmit information and information-based
products in ways which magnetic tape, celluloid and paper did not
permit. Digitalization thus allows music, cinema and the written word
to be recorded and transformed through similar processes and without
distinct material supports. Previously dissimilar industries, such as
publishing and sound recording, now both produce CD-ROM rather than
simply books and records." (Proceedings of the ILO Symposium on
Multimedia Convergence, Introduction, January 1997) In book publishing,
digitization speeded up the editorial process, which used to be
sequential, by allowing the copy editor, the image editor and the
layout staff to work at the same time on the same book. Journalists and
editors could now type in their articles online, and these articles
went directly from text to layout, without being keyed in anymore by
the production staff.

January 1997 > The multimedia convergence

More and more people were using digital technology. 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 ILO (International Labor
Organization) by 1997. The first ILO Symposium on Multimedia
Convergence was held in January 1997 at ILO headquarters in Geneva,
Switzerland, with employers, unionists, and government representatives
from all over the world. Some participants, mostly employers,
demonstrated the information society was generating or would generate
jobs, whereas other participants, mostly unionists, demonstrated there
was a rise in unemployment worldwide, that should be addressed right
away through investment, innovation, vocational training, computer
literacy, retraining, and fair labor rights, including for teleworkers.

April 1997 > E Ink, for the development of an electronic ink

In April 1997, researchers at the MIT Media Lab (MIT: Massachusetts
Institute of Technology) created the company E Ink to develop an
electronic ink technology. Very briefly, the technology is the
following one: caught between two sheets of flexible plastic, millions
of micro-capsules, each of them containing black and white particles,
are   in suspension in a clear fluid. A positive or negative electric
field indicates the desired group of particles on the surface, to view,
modify or delete data. In July 2002, E Ink showed the prototype of the
first screen using this technology. This screen was marketed in 2004.
Other screens were set up for various reading devices, followed by the
first black and white flexible displays (electronic paper).

May 1997 > Barnes & Noble launched its website

Barnes & Noble, a leading U.S. bookseller with 481 stores nationwide,
entered the world of e-commerce in 1997. Barnes & Noble first launched
its America OnLine (AOL) website in March 1997--as the exclusive
bookseller for the 12 million AOL customers--, before launching its own
website, barnesandnoble.com, in May 1997. The site was offering reviews
from authors and publishers, with a catalog of 630,000 titles available
for immediate shipping, and significant discounts: 30% off all in-stock
hardcovers, 20% off all in-stock paperbacks, 40% off select titles, and
up to 90% off bargain books. Its Affiliate Network spread quickly, with
12,000 affiliate websites in May 1998, including CNN Interactive, Lycos
and ZDNet.

June 1997 > 82.3% English-speaking internet users

The percentage of English-speaking internet users decreased from nearly
100% in 1983 to 82.3% in June 1997. People from all over the world
began to have access to the internet, and to post more and more
webpages in their own languages. The first major study about language
distribution on the web was run by Babel, a joint initiative from Alis
Technologies, a company specializing in language translation services,
and the Internet Society. The results were published in June 1997 on a
webpage named Web Languages Hit Parade. The main languages were English
with 82.3%, German with 4.0%, Japanese with 1.6%, French with 1.5%,
Spanish with 1.1%, Swedish with 1.1%, and Italian with 1.0%.

1997 > The digitization of print books

In 1997, a digital book meant scanning it, because most books existed
only in print. To be viewed on the screen, a digitized book could be in
text format or image format. The text format meant scanning the book to
get image files, then converting these image files into text files
using some OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software, and then if
possible correcting the text on the screen by comparing both versions,
because a good OCR software was said to be reliable at 90%, leaving a
few errors per page. The text version of the book did not retain the
original layout of the book or page. The image format was the
photograph of the book page by page, as the digital facsimile of the
printed version. The original layout was preserved, and one could leaf
through the book page after page on the screen. Much cheaper to
produce, the image format didn't allow a full-text search in the book,
a major set back for an electronic book.

1997 > The Library 2000 project

Since the mid-1990s, libraries were studying how to store an enormous
amount of data and make it available on the internet through a reliable
search engine. Library 2000 was a project run between 1995 and 1998 by
the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT: Massachusetts Institute
of Technology) to explore the implications of large scale online
storage, using the digital library of the future as an example. It
developed a prototype using the technology and system configurations
expected to be economically feasible in 2000. Another project was the
Digital Library Initiative, supported by grants from NSF (National
Science Foundation), DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)
and NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). As mentioned
on its website in 1998: "The Initiative's focus is to dramatically
advance the means to collect, store, and organize information in
digital forms, and make it available for searching, retrieval, and
processing via communication networks--all in user-friendly ways."

1997 > The digital library of the British Library

The British Library was a pioneer in Europe as soon as 1997. Brian
Lang, chief executive of the library, explained on its website: "We do
not envisage an exclusively digital library. We are aware that some
people feel that digital materials will predominate in libraries of the
future. Others anticipate that the impact will be slight. (...) The
development of the Digital Library will enable the British Library to
embrace the digital information age. Digital technology will be used to
preserve and extend the Library's unparalleled collection. Access to
the collection will become boundless with users from all over the
world, at any time, having simple, fast access to digitized materials
using computer networks, particularly the internet."

October 1997 > The digital library of the French National Library

The French National Library (BnF: Bibliotheque nationale de France)
launched its digital library Gallica in October 1997 as an experimental
project to offer digitized texts and images from print collections
relating to French history, life and culture, beginning with the 19th
century. It quickly became one of the largest digital libraries of the
internet. The books ranged from the Middle Ages to the early 20th
century, and were digitized as image files, for cost reasons. In
December 2006, the Gallica collection included 90,000 books and
periodicals, 80,000 images, and dozens of hours of sound files. Gallica
also began converting image files of books into text files, to allow
full-text searching. In March 2010, the revamped site of Gallica
(launched in March 2008) reached one million documents, most of which
are available for free.


1997 > The first blog

A blog is an online diary kept by a person or a group. The diary is in
(reverse) chronological order, an can be updated every minute or once
per month. The first blog showed up in 1997. In July 2005, there were
14 million blogs worldwide, with 80,000 new blogs per day. In December
2006, Technorati gave the number of 65 million blogs, with 175,000 new
blogs per day. Some blogs are devoted to photos (photoblogs), music
(audioblogs or podcasts) or video (vlogs or videoblogs).

1997 > Eurodicautom, or European terminology in 12 languages

Managed by the translation service of the European Commission,
Eurodicautom was a multilingual terminology database of economic,
scientific, technical and legal terms and expressions, with language
pairs for the eleven official languages of the European Union (Danish,
English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Netherlands,
Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish) and Latin, and with an average of
120,000 hits per day in 2003. In late 2003, Eurodicautom announced its
integration into a larger terminology database in partnership with
several institutions of the European Union. The new database would deal
with more than 20 languages, because of the enlargement of the European
Union the following year, to include several countries in Eastern
Europe. IATE (InterActive Terminology for Europe) was launched in as a
free public service.

1997 > The Yahoo! Interface in seven languages

In California, two students at Stanford University, David Filo and
Jerry Lang, launched in January 1994 Yahoo!, an online directory to
give access to websites and sort them out by topics. The directory
became quite popular, because of a better classification than the one
of search engines like AltaVista, where these tasks were fully
automated. However, when a search didn't give any result in Yahoo!, it
was automatically shunted to AltaVista, and vice versa. Three years
later, Yahoo! was classifying websites in 63 sections, with an
interface in seven languages: English, French, German, Japanese,
Korean, Norwegian and Swedish.

December 1997 > Babel Fish, or AltaVista Translation

In December 1997, AltaVista, a leading search engine, was the first to
launch a free translation software with Babel Fish--also called
AltaVista Translation--, which could translate webpages (up to three
pages at the same time) from English into French, German, Italian,
Portuguese or Spanish, and vice versa. The software was developed by
SYSTRAN (an acronym for System Translation), a company specializing in
machine translation software. SYSTRAN's headquarters are located in
Soisy-sous-Montmorency,  near Paris, France. Sales, marketing, and
research and development are based in its subsidiary in La Jolla,
California. This initiative was followed by other translation software
developed by Alis Technologies, Globalink, Lernout & Hauspie, and
Softissimo, with free and/or paid versions on the web.

December 1997 > The Logos Dictionary

Logos is a global translation company founded in 1979 by Rodrigo
Vergara, with headquarters in Modena, Italy. In December 1997,  the
company made a bold move, and decided to put on the web the linguistic
tools used by its translators, for the internet community to freely use
them as well. The linguistic tools were the Logos Dictionary, a
multilingual dictionary with 7 billion words (in fall 1998); the Logos
Wordtheque, a multilingual library with 328 billion words extracted
from translated novels, technical manuals and other texts; the Logos
Linguistic Resources, a database of 553 glossaries; and the Logos
Universal Conjugator, a database for verbs in 17 languages. In 2007,
the Logos Library (formerly Wordtheque) had 710 billion words,
Linguistic Resources included 1,215 glossaries, and the Universal
Conjugator (formerly Conjugation of Verbs) included verbs in 36
languages.

1998 > The first volume of the Encyclopedie (1751) online

A common project of the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche
Scientifique--National Scientific Research Center) in France and the
University of Chicago in Illinois (USA), the ARTFL Project (ARTFL:
American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language)
made available on the web in 1998 the database of the first volume of
the Encyclopedie, as an experimental project. This online experiment
was a first step towards a full online version of the first edition
(1751-1772) of the Encyclopedie from Diderot and d'Alembert, with
72,000 articles written by more than 140 contributors (including
Voltaire, Rousseau, Marmontel, d'Holbach, Turgot, etc.), its 17 volumes
of text (with 20,736,912 words and 18,000 pages) and its 11 volumes of
plates. Designed to collect and disseminate the entire knowledge of the
time, the Encyclopedie was a reflection of the intellectual and social
currents of the time, called the Age of Enlightenment, and contributed
to disseminate novel ideas that would inspire the French Revolution in
1789.

April 1998 > The dream behind the web

In a short essay posted on his webpage, Tim Berners-Lee, who invented
the web in 1990, wrote in May 1998: "The dream behind the web is of a
common information space in which we communicate by sharing
information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext
link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it
draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too,
dependent on the web being so generally used that it became a realistic
mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work
and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our
interactions was online, we could then use computers to help us analyze
it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and
how we can better work together" (excerpt from: The World Wide Web: A
very short personal history, available on the W3C website).

May 1998 > Editions 00h00, a pioneer in online publishing

Editions 00h00 (pronounced "zero heure") was created in May 1998 by
Jean-Pierre Arbon and Bruno de Sa Moreira, as a pioneer in commercial
online publishing, to sell digital books through the internet. In 2000,
the catalog included 600 titles, with 85% of sales for digital versions
(in PDF format), and the remaining 15% for on-demand print versions. No
stock, but a direct link with the reader and between readers. On the
website, users/readers could create their personal space to write their
comments, participate in forums, subscribe to an online newsletter, and
watch online video clips about new literary works that were published.
In September 2000, 00h00 was bought by the media company Gemstar.
Gemstar put an end to its eBook experiments in June 2003.

August 1998 > Quote from Michael Hart

Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg in 1971, and the inventor of
ebooks, has dedicated his whole life to put as many literary works
online for free for everyone. He wrote in August 1998: "We consider
etext to be a new medium, with no real relationship 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" (NEF Interview).

September 1998 > Quote from John Mark Ockerbloom

John Mark Ockerbloom created the Online Books Page in 1993. He wrote in
1998: "I've gotten very interested in the great potential the net has
for making literature available to a wide audience. (...) I am very
excited about the potential of the internet as a mass communication
medium in the coming years. I'd also like to stay involved, one way or
another, in making books available to a wide audience for free via the
net, whether I make this explicitly part of my professional career, or
whether I just do it as a spare-time volunteer" (NEF Interview).

September 1998 > Quote from Robert Beard

Robert Beard, founder of A Web of Online Dictionaries in 1995, wrote in
September 1998: "The web will be an encyclopedia of the world by the
world for the world. There will be no information or knowledge that
anyone needs that will not be available. The major hindrance to
international and interpersonal understanding, personal and
institutional enhancement, will be removed. It would take a wilder
imagination than mine to predict the effect of this development on the
nature of humankind" (NEF Interview). In January 2000, Robert Beard
co-founded yourDictionary, a major portal for languages.

October 1998 > An amendment to the U.S. copyright law

Each copyright legislation is more restrictive than the previous one. A
major blow for digital libraries was the amendment to the 1976
Copyright Act signed on October 27, 1998. As explained in July 1999 by
Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg: "Nothing will expire for
another 20 years. We used to have to wait 75 years. Now it is 95 years.
And it was 28 years (+ a possible 28-year extension, only on request)
before that, and 14 years (+ a possible 14-year extension) before that.
So, as you can see, this is a serious degrading of the public domain,
as a matter of continuing policy." The copyright went from an average
of 30 years in 1909 to an average of 95 years in 1998. From 1909 to
1998, it got an extension of 65 years. Only a book published before
1923 can be considered as belonging to the public domain.

1999 > The Rocket eBook was the first ebook reader

The Rocket eBook was launched in 1999 by NuvoMedia, in Palo Alto,
California, as the first dedicated ebook reader. Founded in 1997,
NuvoMedia wanted to become "the electronic book distribution solution,
by providing a networking infrastructure for publishers, retailers and
end users to publish, distribute, purchase and read electronic content
securely and efficiently on the internet." Investors of NuvoMedia were
Barnes & Noble and Bertelsmann. The connection between the Rocket eBook
and the computer (PC or Macintosh) was made through the Rocket eBook
Cradle, which provided power through a wall transformer, and connected
to the computer with a serial cable.

1999 > The SoftBook Reader was the second ebook reader

SoftBook Press created the SoftBook Reader along with the SoftBook
Network, an internet-based content delivery service. With the SoftBook,
launched in 1999, "people could easily, quickly and securely download a
wide selection of books and periodicals using its built-in internet
connection", with a machine that, "unlike a computer, was ergonomically
designed for the reading of long documents and books." The investors of
Softbook Press were Random House and Simon & Schuster.

1999 > Other pioneer ebook readers

Launched in 1999, EveryBook (EB) was "a living library in a single
book". The EveryBook's electronic storage could hold 100 textbooks or
500 novels. The EveryBook used a "hidden" modem to dial into the
EveryBook Store, for people to browse, purchase and receive full text
books, magazines and sheet music. Librius was a "full-service
e-commerce company" that launched in 1999 a small "low-cost" ebook
reader called the Millennium eBook. The website offered a World
Bookstore that delivered digital copies of thousands of books via the
internet.

1999 > The Ulysses Bookstore on the web

Created in 1971 by Catherine Domain in central Paris, on Ile
Saint-Louis in the middle of the river Seine, the Ulysses Bookstore
(Librairie Ulysse) is the oldest bookstore in the world, with 20,000
books, maps and magazines, out of print and new. Catherine started a
website in early 1999, and wrote in December: "My site is still pretty
basic and under construction. Like my bookstore, it is a place to meet
people before being a place of business. The internet is a pain in the
neck, takes a lot of my time and I earn hardly any money, but that
doesn't worry me... I am very pessimistic though, because it is killing
off specialist bookstores" (NEF Interview).

1999 > WordReference.com, or free bilingual dictionaries

WordReference.com was created in 1999 by Michael Kellogg, who wrote on
his project's website: "I started this site in 1999 in an effort to
provide free online bilingual dictionaries and tools to the world for
free on the internet.  The site has grown gradually ever since to
become one of the most-used online dictionaries, and the top online
dictionary for its language pairs of English-Spanish, English-French,
English-Italian, Spanish-French, and Spanish-Portuguese. Today, I am
happy to continue working on improving the dictionaries, its tools and
the language forums. I really do enjoy creating new features to make
the site more and more useful."

1999 > Wordfast, a translation memory software

Created in 1999 by Yves Champollion in Paris, France, Wordfast is a
translation memory software with terminology processing in real time.
Worldfast is compatible with the IBM WebSphere Translation Server and
other translation memory software like Trados. For a few years, a basic
version of Wordfast was available for free, with a manual in 16
languages. In 2010, Wordfast is the most widely used translation memory
solution for many key criteria, including its availability on any
platform (Windows, Mac, Linux), and the second most widely used
translation memory software in the world (the first one being SDL
Trados), with over 20.000 customer deployments, including the United
Nations, Nomura Securities, the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space
Administration) and McGraw-Hill.

September 1999 > The Open eBook (OeB) format

The digital publishing industry felt the need to work on a common
format for ebooks. It released in September 1999 the first version of
the Open eBook (OeB) format, based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language)
and defined by the Open eBook Publication Structure (OeBPS). The Open
eBook Forum was created in January 2000 to develop the OeB format and
OeBPS specifications. Since 2000, most ebook formats have been derived
from--or are compatible with--the OeB format, for example the PRC
format from Mobipocket or the LIT format from Microsoft.

December 1999 > Britannica.com, or the Encyclopedia Britannica on the
web

Britannica.com was launched in December 1999. The website is the
digital equivalent of the 32 volumes of the 15th edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica, available for free, as a complement to the
print version and CD-ROM version. The website also offers a selection
of articles from 70 magazines, a guide to the best websites, a
selection of books, etc., with a single search engine. In September
2000, the site is in the top 100 websites in the world. In July 2001,
the website is available for a monthly or annual. In 2009,
Britannica.com opened its website to external contributors, with
registration required to write and edit articles.

December 1999 > Two French-language encyclopedias on the web

Launched by Editions Atlas in December 1999, Webencyclo was the first
main French-language online encyclopedia available for free on the web.
It was possible to search the encyclopedia by keyword, topic, media
(maps, links, photos and illustrations) and ideas. A call for papers
invited specialists in a given topic to become external contributors
and submit articles in a section called Webencyclo Contributif. Later
on, a free registration was required to use the online encyclopedia.
Launched at the same time, the website of Encyclopedia Universalis
included 28,000 articles by 4,000 contributors. The website has been
available for an annual fee, and a number of articles are also
available for free.

January 2000 > The Million Book Project

Launched in January 2000 by the Carnegie Mellon University
(Pennsylvania, United States), the Million Book Project, also called
the Universal Library or Universal Digital Library (UDL), aimed to
digitize one million books in a number of languages, including in India
and China. The project was completed in 2007. One million books have
been available on the university website, as image files in DjVu and
TIFF formats, with three mirror sites in northern China, southern China
and India. The project may have inspired the Open Content Alliance
(OCA), a universal public digital library launched by the Internet
Archive in October 2005.

February 2000 > yourDictionary.com

Robert Beard, a professor at Bucknell University (USA), first created
in 1995 A Web of Online Dictionaries as a directory of online
dictionaries (with 800 links in fall 1998) and other linguistic
resources such as thesauri, vocabularies, glossaries, grammars, and
language textbooks. Robert Beard co-founded then yourDictionary.com,
that included its previous website and went online in February 2000.
yourDictionary.com included 1,800 dictionaries in 250 languages in
September 2003, and 2,500 dictionaries in 300 languages in April 2007.
As a tool for all languages without exception, the portal also offers
the Endangered Language Repository.

March 2000 > The Oxford English Dictionary online

The online version (for a subscription fee) of the Oxford English
Dictionary (OED), a dictionary in 20 volumes, was launched in March
2000 by the Oxford University Press (OUP) launched in March 2000. The
website offers a quarterly update of the dictionary with 1,000 new or
revised entries. In March 2002, two years after this first experience,
the Oxford University Press launches Oxford Reference Online (ORO), a
comprehensive encyclopedia designed directly for the web and also
available for a subscription fee. Its 60,000 pages and one million
entries could represent the equivalent of one hundred print
encyclopedias.

March 2000 > Mobipocket, or ebooks for PDAs

Mobipocket was founded in March 2000 in Paris, France, by Thierry
Brethes and Nathalie Ting, as a company specializing in ebooks for
PDAs, with some funding from Vivendi. The Mobipocket format (PRC, based
on the OeB format) and the Mobipocket Reader were "universal" and could
be used on any PDA--and also on any computer from April 2002. They
quickly became global standards for ebooks on mobile devices. In spring
2003, the Mobipocket Reader was available in several languages (French,
English, German, Spanish, Italian) and could also be used on the
smartphones of Nokia and Sony Ericsson. 6,000 titles in several
languages were available on Mobipocket's website and in partner online
bookstores. Mobipocket was bought by Amazon in April 2005. It now
operates within the Amazon brand, with a multilingual catalog of 70,000
books in 2008.

April 2000 > The Pocket PC and the Microsoft Reader

Microsoft launched the Microsoft Reader in April 2000, for people to
read books in LIT (from "literature") format on its new PDA, the Pocket
PC. Four months later, in August 2000, the Microsoft Reader was
available for computers, and then for any Windows platform, for example
the platforms of the Tablets PC launched in November 2002. Microsoft
billed publishers and distributors for the use of its DRM technology
through the Microsoft DAS Server, with a commission on each sale.
Microsoft also partnered with major online bookstores--Barnes &
Noble.com in January 2000 and Amazon.com in August 2000--for them to
offer ebooks for the Microsoft Reader in eBookstores soon to be
launched. Barnes & Noble.com opened its eBookstore in August 2000,
followed by Amazon in November 2000.

June 2000 > Quote from Jean-Paul

Jean-Paul began searching how hyperlinks could expand his writing
towards new directions. He switched from being a print author to being
an hypermedia author, and the webmaster of cotres.net. He wrote in June
2000: "Surfing the web is like radiating in all directions (I am
interested in something and I click on all the links on a home page) or
like jumping around (from one click to another, as the links appear).
You can do this in the written media, of course. But the difference is
striking. So the internet changed how I write. You don't write the same
way for a website as you do for a script or a play. (...) Since then I
write directly on the screen: I use the print medium only occasionally
(...): the text is developing page after page (most of the time),
whereas the technique of links allows another relationship to the time
and space of imagination. And, for me, it is above all the opportunity
to put into practice this reading/writing 'cycle', whereas leafing
through a book gives only an idea--which is vague because the book is
not conceived for that" (NEF Interview).

July 2000 > 50% non English-speaking internet users

In summer 1999, internet users living outside the U.S. reached 50%. One
year later, in summer 2000, non English-speaking users reached 50% in
summer 2000. According to Global Reach, they were 52.5% in summer 2001,
57% in December 2001, 59.8% in April 2002, 64.4% in September 2003
(including 34.9% non-English-speaking Europeans and 29.4% Asians), and
64.2% in March 2004 (including 37.9% non-English-speaking Europeans and
33% Asians). This was a turning point for a multilingual internet,
although much still needed to be done to offer more websites in
languages other than English, bilingual websites and multilingual
websites.

July 2000 > Stephen King, a digital pioneer

In July 2000 began the electronic (self-)publishing of The Plant, an
epistolary novel by Stephen King, who was the first author of
best-sellers to make such a bet. Stephen King started his digital
experiment with the distribution in March 2000 of his short story
Riding the Bullet, which was downloaded 400,000 times during the first
24 hours, and brought a lot of media buzz. Then he created a website to
self-publish his novel The Plant in episodes. The chapters were
published at regular intervals and could be downloaded in several
formats (PDF, OeB, HTML, TXT). But after the publication of the sixth
chapter in December 2000, the author decided to step down and stop this
experiment because more and more readers were downloading the chapters
without paying for them. Stephen King went on with digital experiments
though, but this time in partnership with his publisher.

August 2000 > Barnes & Noble.com opened its eBookStore

Barnes & Noble.com, the website of Barnes & Noble, started its
eBookStore in August 2000, following a partnership with Microsoft in
January 2000 to sell digital books  for the Microsoft Reader. This
software being free, Microsoft was billing the publishers and
distributors for the use of its DRM technology, with a commission too
on the sale of each title. Barnes & Noble.com also partnered with Adobe
in August 2000 to sell books for the Acrobat Reader and the Glassbook
Reader (Adobe had just bought Glassbook, with its reader and its
digital bookstore).

September 2000 > The GDT, a bilingual French-English dictionary

The OQLF (Office Quebecois de la Langue Francaise - Quebecois Office of
the French Language) launched in September 2000 the GDT (Grand
Dictionnaire Terminologique), a bilingual French-English dictionary
with 3 million terms related to industry, science and commerce. This
online version was the result of a partnership between the OQLF, author
of the dictionary, and Semantix, a company specializing in linguistic
software. During the first month, the GDT counted 1.3 million hits,
with peaks of 60,000 daily hits, a huge success for this dictionary,
and a technology challenge. The database was then maintained by Convera
Canada, with 3.5 million hits per month in February 2003. A revamped
version of the GDT went online in March 2003. The database has now
being maintained by the OQLF itself, with the addition of Latin as a
third language.

September 2000 > Numilog, a French-language digital bookstore

Numilog was founded in March 2000 by Denis Zwirn near Paris, France, as
a company specializing in the distribution of digital books. Numilog
launched in September 2000 an online bookstore that became the main
French-language aggregator of digital books over the years. In December
2006, the catalog included 35,000 books and audiobooks from 60
publishers, including Gallimard, POL, Le Dilettante, Le Rocher, La
Decouverte, De Vive Voix, Eyrolles or Pearson Education France. Numilog
was bought in May 2008 by Hachette Livre, a leading publishing group.
In January, there were 100,000 ebooks from 100 publishers, with
tailored services for bookstores and libraries.

October 2000 > Distributed Proofreaders

Distributed Proofreaders was founded in 2000 by Charles Franks to
support the digitization of public domain books. Originally conceived
to assist Project Gutenberg, Distributed Proofreaders is now the main
source of its ebooks. In 2002, Distributed Proofreaders became an
official Project Gutenberg site. In May 2006, Distributed Proofreaders
became a separate legal entity and continues to maintain a strong
relationship with Project Gutenberg. Distributed Proofreaders has
digitized 10,000 books in December 2006 and 18,000 books in June 2010.
Distributed Proofreaders Europe was founded in 2004. Distributed
Proofreaders Canada (DP Canada) was founded in July 2007.

October 2000 > The Public Library of Science, or science for all

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) was founded in October 2000 by
biomedical scientists. Headquartered in San Francisco, PLoS is a
non-profit organization whose mission is to give access to the world's
scientific and medical literature, with a search engine and hyperlinks
between articles. PLoS posted an open letter requesting the articles
presently published by journals to be distributed freely in online
archives, and asking researchers to promote the publishers willing to
support this project. From October 2000 to September 2002, the open
letter was signed by 30,000 scientists from 180 countries. The
publishers' answer was much less enthusiastic, although a number of
publishers agreed for their articles to be distributed freely
immediately after publication, or six months after publication in their
journals. But even the publishers who initially agreed to support the
project made so many objections that it was finally abandoned. PloS
became a publisher in January 2003.

October 2000 > The eBookMan, a personal assistant from Franklin

In October 2000, Franklin launched the eBookMan, a multimedia personal
assistant that--among other features (calendar, voice recorder,
etc.)--allowed people to read books on the Franklin Reader. Three models
(EBM-900, EBM-901 and EBM-911) were available in early 2001, for
US$130, $180 or $230 depending on the size of RAM (8 or 16 MB) and a
backlit or not LCD screen. Much larger than the screen of its
competitors, the screen  was only in black and white, unlike the Pocket
PC or some PDAs from Palm. The eBookMan could also be used to listen to
audiobooks and music files in MP3 format. In October 2001, people could
read books on the Mobipocket Reader, and the Franklin Reader was
available for the Pocket PC and PDAs from Psion, Palm and Nokia.

November 2000 > The Gemstar eBook

The Gemstar eBook was launched in October 2000 by Gemstar-TV Guide
International, a company providing digital products and services for
the media. Gemstar first bought Nuvomedia (Rocket eBook) and SoftBook
Press (SoftBook) in January 2000, as well as the French 00h00.com, a
producer of digital books, in September 2000.  Two Gemstar eBook were
available for sale in the U.S. in November 2000, with a later attempt
in Germany to test the European market. The REB 1100 had a black and
white screen, like the Rocket eBook. The REB 1200 had a color screen,
like the SoftBook Reader. Both were produced by RCA (Thomson
Multimedia).  New and cheaper models were then launched as GEB 1150 and
2150, produced by Gemstar instead of RCA. But the sales were still far
below expectations. The company stopped selling ebook readers in June
2003, and ebooks the following month.

November 2000 > The original Bible of Gutenberg online

The digitized version of the Bible of Gutenberg was available online in
November 2000. Gutenberg printed its Bible in 1454 or 1455 in Germany,
perhaps printing 180 copies, with 48 copies still available in 2000,
and three copies--two full ones and one partial one--at the British
Library. The two full copies--a little different from each other--were
digitized in March 2000 by Japanese experts from Keio University
of Tokyo and NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Communications). The
images were then processed to offer a full digital version on the web a
few months later, for the world to enjoy.

November 2000 > Frederick Forsyth made a digital experiment

Following Stephen King's footsteps, Frederick Forsyth, the British
master of thrillers,  decided to make a digital experiment in
partnership with Online Originals, an electronic publisher from London.
In November 2000, Online Originals Veteran published online The
Veteran, which as the story of a violent crime in London, and the first
part of Quintet, a collection of five short stories (announced in the
following order: The Veteran, The Miracle, The Citizen, The Art of the
Matter, and Draco). Available in three formats (PDF, Microsoft Reader
and Glassbook Reader), the short story was sold for 3.99 pounds (6.60
euros) on the publisher's website and in several online bookstores in
UK (Alphabetstreet, BOL.com, WHSmith) and in the U.S. (Barnes & Noble,
Contentville, Glassbook).

November 2000 > Arturo Perez-Reverte made a digital experiment

Arturo Perez-Reverte, a Spanish novelist, is famous for his
best-sellers telling the adventurous life of Capitan Alatriste in the
17th century. The new title to be released in 2000 was El Oro del Rey
(The King's Gold). In November 2000, the author partnered with his
publisher Alfaguara to publish El Oro del Rey exclusively in digital
form for one month, on a specific site of the web portal Inicia, before
the release of the print version in bookstores. The novel was available
in PDF format for 2.90 euros, a much cheaper price than the 15.10 euros
of the forthcoming print book. As a result of the experiment, the
number of downloads  was very good, but not the number of payments. A
month after publishing the novel online, there are 332,000 downloads,
but only 12,000 readers who paid for it.

November 2000 > Amazon.com opened its eBookStore

Amazon.com started its eBookStore in November 2000, following a
partnership with Microsoft in August 2000 to sell digital books for the
Microsoft Reader. This software being free, Microsoft was billing the
publishers and distributors and publishers for the use of its DRM
technology, with a commission too on the sale of each title.  The same
month, Amazon.com also partnered with Adobe to offer digital books for
the Acrobat Reader and the Glassbook Reader (Adobe had just bought
Glassbook, with its reader and digital bookstore). In April 2001,
Amazon.com partnered again with Adobe to include in its collection
2,000 copyrighted books for the Acrobat eBook Reader, mainly titles
from main publishers, travel guides, and children books.

December 2000 > Gyricon Media, to develop an electronic ink technology

In December 2000, researchers at PARC (Palo Alto Research Center), the
Xerox center in Silicon Valley, founded the company Gyricon Media to
market the SmartPaper, an electronic paper based on the display
technology called gyricon (developed since 1997 within Xerox). Very
briefly explained, the technology was the following one: in between two
sheets of flexible plastic, millions of micro-cells contain two-tone
(for example black and white) beads suspended in a clear liquid. Each
bead has an electric charge. An external electrical pulse make the
balls rotate and change color, to display, modify or delete data. In
2004, the market was commercial advertising, with small posters running
on batteries. The company ended in 2005, with R&D activities going on
at Xerox.

2000 > The wiki, a collaborative website

Deriving from the Hawaiian term "wiki" (meaning: fast), a wiki is a
website allowing multiple users to collaborate online on the same
project. The wiki concept became  quite popular in 2000. At any time,
users can contribute to drafting content, edit it, improving it and
updating it. The wiki has been used for example to create and manage
dictionaries, encyclopedias or reference tools. The software can be
simple or more elaborate. A simple program handles text and hyperlinks.
With a more elaborate program, you can embed images, charts, tables,
etc.. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia. On this photo from Wikipedia,
the Wiki Wiki shuttle from the Honolulu International Airport.

January 2001 > Wikipedia, a global free online encyclopedia

Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger
(Larry resigned later on). It has quickly grown into the largest
reference website on the internet, financed by donations, with no
advertising. Its multilingual content is free and written
collaboratively by people worldwide, who contribute under a pseudonym.
Its website is a wiki, which means that anyone can edit, correct and
improve information throughout the encyclopedia. The articles stay the
property of their authors, and can be freely used according to the GFDL
(GNU Free Documentation License). In December 2004, Wikipedia had 1.3
million articles (by 13,000 contributors) in 100 languages. In December
2006, it had 6 million articles in 250 languages. In May 2007, it had 7
million articles in 192 languages, including 1.8 million articles in
English, 589,000 articles in German, 500,000 articles in French,
260,000 articles in Portuguese, and 236,000 articles in Spanish.

January 2001 > The UNDL Foundation, for a "universal" metalanguage

The UNL (Universal Networking Language) project was launched in
mid-1990s the as a main digital metalanguage project by the Institute
of Advanced Studies (IAS) of the United Nations University (UNU) in
Tokyo, Japan. As explained on the bilingual (English, Japanese) website
in 1998: "UNL is a language that--with its companion 'enconverter'
and 'deconverter' software--enables communication among peoples of
differing native languages. It will reside, as a plug-in for popular
web browsers, on the internet, and will be compatible with standard
network servers." In 2000, 120 researchers worldwide were working on a
multilingual project in 16 languages (Arabic, Brazilian, Chinese,
English, French, German, Hindu, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Latvian,
Mongolian, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, and Thai). The UNDL Foundation
(UNDL: Universal Networking Digital Language) was founded in January
2001 to develop and promote the UNL project.

January 2001 > The Cybook, a European ebook reader

Developed by Cytale, a company created by Olivier Pujol, the first
Cybook (21 x 16 cm, 1 kilo) was   available in January 2001. Its memory
- 32 M of SDRAM and 16 M of flash memory - could store 15.000 pages, or
30 books of 500 pages. But sales were not as good as planned, and
Cytale ended in July 2002. The Cybook project was taken over by the
company Bookeen, created in 2003 by Michael Dahan and Laurent Picard,
who previously worked at Cytale. The Cybook second generation was
available in June 2004. Bookeen launched the Cybook Gen3 in July 2007,
with a screen using the E Ink technology.

January 2001 > The Acrobat eBook Reader

In January 2001, Adobe launched the Acrobat eBook Reader (free) and the
Adobe Content Server (for a fee). The Acrobat eBook Reader was used to
read PDF files of copyrighted books, while adding notes and bookmarks,
getting the book covers in a personal library, and browsing a
dictionary. The Adobe Content Server was intended for publishers and
distributors for the packaging, protection, distribution and sale of
copyrighted books in PDF format, while managing their access with DRM
(Digital Rights Management), according to instructions given by the
copyright holder, for example allowing or not the printing and loan of
ebooks.

February 2001 > A quote from Russon Wooldridge

Russon Wooldridge is a professor at the Department of French Studies in
the University of Toronto, Canada, and the founder of the Net des
Etudes Francaises (Net of French Studies). He wrote in February 2001:
"My research, conducted once in an ivory tower, is now almost
exclusively done through local or remote collaborations. (...) All my
teaching makes the most of internet resources (web and email): the two
common places for a course are the classroom and the website of the
course, where I put all course materials. I have published all my
research data of the last 20 years on the web (re-edition of books,
articles, texts of old dictionaries as interactive databases, treaties
from the 16th century, etc.). I publish proceedings of symposiums, I
publish a journal, I collaborate with French colleagues by publishing
online in Toronto what they can't publish online at home." (NEF
Interview)

March 2001 > IBM launched the WebSphere Translation Server

In March 2001, IBM embarked on a growing translation market with a
high-end professional product, the WebSphere Translation Server. The
software could instantly translate in several languages (Chinese,
English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Spanish) webpages,
emails and chats. It could process 500 words per second and add
specific terminology to the software.

March 2001 > Palm launched the Palm Reader

In March 2001, Palm bought Peanutpress.com, a publisher and distributor
of digital books for PDAs, that previously belonged to the netLibrary
company. The Peanut Reader merged with (or became) the Palm Reader,
that could be used on Palm Pilots and Pocket PCs, and the 2,000 titles
from Peanutpress.com were transferred to the digital bookstore Palm
Digital Media. In July 2002, the Palm Reader was also available for
computers. Palm Digital Media distributes 5,500 titles in several
languages in July 2002, and 10,000 titles in 2003. Photo: Palm Treo
700p.

April 2001 > PDAs and ebook readers: a few numbers

There were 17 million PDAs worldwide and only 100,000 ebook readers in
April 2001, according to the Seybold Report. 13,2 million PDAs were
sold in 2001.  Palm stayed the leader, despite fierce competition, with
23 million Palm Pilots sold between 1996 and 2002. In 2002, 36.8% of
all PDAs available on the market were Palm Pilots. Its main competitor
was Microsoft's Pocket PC. The main platforms were Palm OS (for 55% of
PDAs) and Pocket PC (for 25,7%). In 2004, prices began to drop. The
leaders were the PDAs of Palm, Sony, and Hewlett-Packard, followed by
Handspring, Toshiba, and Casio.  But smartphones were more and more
popular, and the sales of PDAs began to drop.  Sony stopped selling
PDAs in February 2005.

October 2001 > The Wayback Machine

In October 2001, with 30 billion stored webpages, the Internet Archive
launched the Wayback Machine, for users to be able to surf the archive
of the web by date. In 2004, there were 300 terabytes of data, with a
growth of 12 terabytes per month. There were 65 billion webpages (from
50 million websites) in 2006, 85 billion webpages in 2008 and 150
billion webpages in March 2010. Founded in April 1996 by Brewster
Kahle, the Internet Archive is a non-profit organization that has built
an "internet library" to offer permanent access to historical
collections in digital format for researchers, historians and scholars.
An archive of the web is stored  every two months or so.

2001 > The Creative Commons License

Creative Commons (CC) was founded in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig, a
professor at Stanford Law School, California. As explained on its
website: "Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to
making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others,
consistent with the rules of copyright. We provide free licenses and
other legal tools to mark creative work with the freedom the creator
wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any
combination thereof." There were one million Creative Commons licensed
works in 2003, 4.7 million licensed works in 2004, 20 million licensed
works in 2005, 50 million licensed works in 2006, 90 million licensed
works in 2007, 130 million licensed works in 2008, and 350 million
licensed works in April 2010.

2001 > Nokia 9210 was the first smartphone

The first smartphone was Nokia 9210, launched as early as 2001. It was
followed by Nokia Series 60, Sony Ericsson P800, and the smartphones of
Motorola and Siemens. Smartphones took off quickly. In February 2005,
Sony stopped selling PDAs. Smartphones represented 3,7% of all
cellphones sold in 2004, and 9% of all cellphones sold in 2006, with 90
million smartphones sold for one billion cellphones.

January 2003 > The Public Library of Science, as a publisher of journals

In early 2003, PLoS created a non-profit scientific and medical
publishing venture to provide scientists and physicians with free
high-quality, high-profile journals in which to publish their work. The
journals were PloS Biology (launched in 2003), PLoS Medicine (2004),
PLoS Genetics (2005), PLoS Computational Biology (2005), PLoS Pathogens
(2005), PLoS Clinical Trials (2006) and PLoS Neglected Tropical
Diseases (2007), the first scientific journal on this topic. All PLoS
articles are freely available online, on the websites of PLoS and in
the public archive PubMed Central, run by the National Library of
Medicine. The articles can be freely redistributed and reused under a
Creative Commons license, including for translations, as long as the
author(s) and source are cited.

February 2003 > Quote from Nicolas Pewny

A bookseller, publisher, and consultant in electronic publishing,
Nicolas Pewny wrote in February 2003: "I see the future digital book as
a 'total work' putting together text, sound, images, video, and
interactivity: a new way to design, and write, and read, perhaps on a
single book, constantly renewed, which would contain everything we have
read, a single and multiple companion. Utopian? Improbable? Maybe not
that much!" (NEF Interview)

February 2003 > The website of Handicapzero

The association Handicapzero aims to improve the autonomy of visually
impaired people in the French-speaking world, around 10% of the
population. Launched in September 2000, the website of the association
has quickly become a must, with 10,000 queries monthly. The association
replaced it in February 2003 with a general portal offering free access
to national and international news, sports news, TV programs, the
weather forecast, and access to a full range of services for health,
employment, consumer goods, leisure time, sports and telephony. Since
October 2006, a revamped portal has offered more tools for blind
people, visually impaired people, and people who want to communicate
with them. The portal was used by 2 million people in 2006.

March 2003 > Paulo Coelho made a digital experiment

Paulo Coelho, a Brazilian novelist, became world famous after the
publication of The Alchemist. In early 2003, his books, translated into
56 languages, have been sold in 53 million copies in 155 countries. In
March 2003, Paulo Coelho decided to distribute several novels for free
in PDF format, in various languages, with the consent of his publishers.

May 2003 > Adobe Reader replaced Acrobat Reader

In May 2003, Acrobat Reader (5th version) merged with Acrobat eBook
Reader (2nd version) to become Adobe Reader (starting with version 6),
which could read both standard PDF files and secure PDF files of
copyrighted books. In late 2003, Adobe opened its own online bookstore,
the Digital Media Store, with titles in PDF format from major
publishers (HarperCollins, Random House, Simon & Schuster, etc.) as
well as electronic versions of newspapers and magazines like The New
York Times, Popular Science, etc. Adobe also launched Adobe eBooks
Central as a service to read, publish, sell and lend ebooks, and Adobe
eBook Library as a prototype digital library.

September 2003 > The MIT OpenCourseWare

The MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative launched by MIT
(Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to put its course materials for
free on the web, as a way to promote open dissemination of knowledge.
In September 2002, a pilot version was available online with 32 course
materials. The website was officially launched in September 2003. 500
course materials were available in March 2004. In May 2006, 1,400
course materials were offered by 34 departments belonging to the five
schools of MIT. In November 2007, all 1,800 course materials were
available, and regularly updated. MIT also launched the OpenCourseWare
Consortium (OCW Consortium) in November 2005, as a collaboration of
educational institutions that were willing to offer free online course
materials. One year later, it included the course materials of 100
universities worldwide.

February 2004 > Facebook, a social network

Facebook is a social network founded in February 2004 by Mark
Zuckerberg and his fellow students Eduardo Saverini, Dustin Moskovitz
and Chris Hughes. Originally created for students of Harvard
University, it was made available to students from any university in
the U.S., and open to all from September 2006 to connect with
relatives, friends and strangers. It was become the second most visited
website in the world, after Google, if not the first, with 500 million
users in June 2010, while sparking debates on privacy issues.

April 2004 > The Librie, an ebook reader from Sony

Sony launched its first ebook reader, Librie 1000-EP, in Japan in April
2004, in partnership with Philips and E Ink. Librie was the first ebook
reader to use the E Ink technology, with a 6-inch screen, a 10 M
memory, and a 500-ebook capacity. eBooks were downloaded from a
computer through a USB port. The Librie is the ancestor of the Sony
Reader, launched in October 2006 in the U.S.

2004 > The web 2.0, based on community and sharing

Since 2004, the web 2.0 has been based on community and sharing, with a
wealth of websites whose content is supplied by users, such as blogs,
wikis, social networks or collaborative encyclopedias. Wikipedia,
Facebook and Twitter, of course, but also tens of thousands of others.
The term "web 2.0" was invented in 2004 by Tim O'Reilly, founder of
O'Reilly Media, a publisher of computer books, as the title for a
conference he was organizing . The web 2.0 concept may answer the dream
of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web in 1990, as "the web being so
generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the
primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and
socialize." (The World Wide Web: A very short personal history, 1998)

2005 > Smartphones or ebook readers?

Can ebook readers like Sony Reader and Kindle really compete with
cellphones and smartphones? Will people prefer reading on mobile
handsets like the iPhone 3G (with its Stanza Reader) or the T-Mobile G1
(with Google's platform Android and its reader), or will they prefer
using ebook readers to get a larger screen? Or is there a market for
both smartphones and ebook readers? These are some fascinating
questions for the following years.

April 2005 > The ePub format

In April 2005, the Open eBook Forum became the International Digital
Publishing Forum (IDPF). The OeB format was replaced with the ePub
format (ePub standing for "electronic publication") as a global
standard for ebooks. More and more digital books are in ePub format,
widely used by publishers to distribute their ebooks, because it is
designed for reflowable content, meaning that the text display can be
optimized for the particular display device used by the reader:
computer, smartphone, ebook reader, large screen, medium screen, small
screen. The format is meant to function as a single format that
publishers and conversion houses can use in-house, as well as for
distribution and sale. The PDF files created with recent versions of
Adobe Acrobat are compatible with the ePub format.

May 2005 > Google Print The beta version of Google Print went live in
May 2005. In October 2004, Google launched the first part of Google
Print as a project aimed at publishers, for internet users to be able
to see excerpts from their books and order them online. In December
2004, Google launched the second part of Google Print as a project
intended for libraries, to build up a digital library of 15 million
books by digitizing the collections of main partner libraries,
beginning with the universities of Michigan (7 million books), Harvard,
Stanford and Oxford, and the New York Public Library. The planned cost
in 2004 was an average of US $10 per book, and a total budget of $150
to $200 million for ten years. In August 2005, Google Print was stopped
until further notice because of lawsuits filed by associations of
authors and publishers for copyright infringement.

August 2006 > Google Books

The program resumed in August 2006 under the new name of Google Books.
Google Books has provided the full text for public domain books and has
offered excerpts from books digitized by Google in the participating
libraries. As of December 2008, Google had 24 library partners,
including a Swiss one (University Library of Lausanne), a French one
(Lyon Municipal Library), a Belgian one (Ghent University Library), a
German one (Bavarian State Library), two Spanish ones (National Library
of Catalonia and University Complutense of Madrid) and a Japanese one
(Keio University Library). The U.S. partner libraries were, by
alphabetical order: Columbia University, Committee on Institutional
Cooperation (CIC), Cornell University Library, Harvard University, New
York Public Library, Oxford University, Princeton University, Stanford
University, University of California, University of Michigan,
University of Texas at Austin, University of Virginia and University of
Wisconsin-Madison.

August 2006 > The Open Content Alliance

The Open Content Alliance (OCA) was launched in October 2005 as a group
of cultural, technology, non profit and governmental organizations
willing to build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and
multimedia content. The project took off in summer 2006, with the
digitization of public domain books around the world. The first 100,000
ebooks available in December 2006 in the Text Archive of the Internet
Archive, with 12,000 new books per month. Unlike Google Books, the Open
Content Alliance (OCA) has made them searchable through any web search
engine, and has not scanned copyrighted books, except when the
copyright holder has expressly given permission. The first contributors
to OCA were the University of California, the University of Toronto,
the European Archive, the National Archives in United Kingdom, O'Reilly
Media and the Prelinger Archives. One million ebooks in December 2008
and two million books in March 2010 were posted under OCA principles by
the Internet Archive.

August 2006 > The union catalog WorldCat on the web

WorldCat is a union catalog run by OCLC (Online Computer Library
Center), created in 1971 as a non-profit organization dedicated to
furthering access to the world's information while reducing information
costs. In 2005, WorldCat had 61 million bibliographic records in 400
languages, from 9,000 member libraries in 112 countries. In 2006, 73
million bibliographic records were linking to one billion documents
available in these libraries. In August 2006, WorldCat began to migrate
to the web through the beta version of its new website worldcat.org.
Member libraries now provided free access to their catalogs and
electronic resources: books, audiobooks, abstracts and full-text
articles, photos, music CDs and videos. In April 2010, WorldCat had 1,5
billion documents.

2006 > Twitter, or information in 140 characters

Founded in 2006 in California by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams and Biz
Stone, Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging tool, for
users to send free short messages of 140 characters maximum, called
tweets, via the internet, IM, or SMS. Sometimes described as the SMS
of the internet, Twitter has since gained worldwide popularity, with
106 million users in April 2010 and 300,000 new users per day. As for
tweets, there were 5,000 per day in 2007, 300,000 in 2008, 2,5 million
in 2009, 50 million in January 2010 and 55 million in April 2010, with
a systematic archiving by the Library of Congress as a reflection of
trends of our time, and their addition by Google in the results of its
search engine.

October 2006 > The Sony Reader

The Sony Reader was launched in October 2006 in the U.S. for US $350,
followed by  cheaper and revamped models. The Sony Reader was the first
ebook reader to use the new advanced E Ink screen technology, "a screen
that gives an excellent reading experience very close to that of real
paper, making it very easy going on the eyes" (Mike Cook). Another
major feature of the reader over most other electronic devices is its
battery life, with over 7,000 pages turns - or up to two weeks of power
- on just one battery charge. It is also the first ebook reader to use
Adobe's Digital Editions. The Sony Reader is available in the U.S.,
Canada, UK, Germany and France.


December 2006 > Microsoft Live Search Books

The beta version of Live Search Books was released in December 2006,
with a search possible by keyword for non copyrighted books digitized
by Microsoft in partner libraries. The British Library and the
libraries of the universities of California and Toronto were the first
ones to join in, followed in January 2007 by the New York Public
Library and Cornell University. Books offered full text views and could
be downloaded in PDF files. In May 2007, Microsoft announced agreements
with several publishers, including Cambridge University Press and
McGraw Hill, for their books to be available in Live Search Books.
After digitizing 750,000 books and indexing 80 million journal
articles, Microsoft ended the Live Search Books program in May 2008.
These books are available in the OCA collections of the Internet
Archive.

December 2006 > Quote from Marc Autret

Marc Autret, a journalist and graphic designer, wrote in December 2006:
"I imagine the ebook of the future as a kind of wiki crystallized and
packaged in a format. How valuable will it be? Its value will be the
value of a book: the unity and quality of editorial work!" (NEF
Interview)

December 2006 > Quote from Pierre Schweitzer

Peter Schweitzer, inventor of the @folio project, wrote in December
2006: "The luck we all have is to live here and now this fantastic
change. When I was born in 1963, computers didn't have much memory.
Today, my music player could hold billions of pages, a true local
library. Tomorrow, by the combined effect of the Moore Law and the
ubiquity of networks, we will have instant access to works and
knowledge. We won't be much interested any more on which device to
store information. We will be interested in handy functions and
beautiful objects." (NEF Interview)

March 2007 > Citizendium, a collaborative encyclopedia

Citizendium is a pilot project to build a new encyclopedia, at the
initiative of Larry Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia (with Jimmy Wales)
in January 2001, but resigned later on, over policy and content quality
issues. Citizendium--which stands for The Citizens' Compendium--is a
wiki project open to public collaboration, but combining "public
participation with gentle expert guidance". The project is experts-led,
not experts-only. Contributors use their own names, not anonymous
pseudonyms (like in Wikipedia), and they are guided by expert editors.
There are also constables who make sure the rules are respected.
Citizendium was launched on March 25, 2007, with 1,100 articles, 820
authors and 180 editors. There were 11,800 high-quality articles in
August 2009. Citizendium also wants to act as a prototype for upcoming
large scale knowledge-building projects that would deliver reliable
reference, scholarly and educational content.

May 2007 > The Encyclopedia of Life

The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) was launched in May 2007 as a global
scientific effort to document all known species of animals and plants
(1.8 million), including endangered species, and expedite the millions
of species yet to be discovered and cataloged (about 8 million). The
encyclopedia's honorary chair is Edward Wilson, professor emeritus at
Harvard University, who was the first to express the wish for such an
encyclopedia, in an essay dated 2002. The multimedia encyclopedia will
gather texts, photos, maps, sound and videos, with a webpage for each
species. It will provide a single portal for millions of documents
scattered online and offline.  The first pages were available in
mid-2008. The encyclopedia should be completed with all known species
in 2017. The English version will be translated in several languages by
partner organizations.

June 2007 > IATE, or European terminology in 24 languages

IATE (InterActive Terminology for Europe) was launched in March 2007 as
an eagerly awaited free service on the web, with 1.4 million entries in
24 languages, after being launched in summer 2004 for the European
institutions. The new terminological database is available in 24
languages, instead of the 12 languages of the former database
Eurodicautom. The European Union went from 15 country members to 25
country members in May 2004, and 27 country members in January 2007.
IATE is maintained by the Translation Center of the institutions of the
European Union in Luxembourg. In 2009, IATE included 8,4 million words,
with 540,000 abbreviations  and 130.000 expressions.

June 2007 > The iPhone from Apple

Launched in January 2007 by Apple, the iPhone is a smartphone including
an iPod (the iPod was launched in October 2001), a camera, and a web
browser, with the following specifications: a large tactile screen (3,5
inches), synchronization with the iTunes platform to download music and
videos, a camera of 2 megapixels, the Safari browser, the Mac OS X
operating system, access to GSM (Global System for Mobile
Telecommunications)  and EDGE (Enhanced Data for GSM Evolution), WiFi
and Bluetooth. The iPhone was launched in June 2007 in the U.S. for
US$499 for the 4 G version and $599 for the 8 G version. It was
launched in Europe in late 2007 and in Asia in 2008. Other models
follow. The iPhone 4 was launched in June 2010.

August 2007 > Quote from Denis Zwirn

President of Numilog, the main French-language digital bookstore, Denis
Zwirn wrote in August 2007: "The digital book is not any more a topic
for symposiums, conceptual definitions or divination by some "experts".
It is a commercial product and a tool for reading. There is no need to
wait for some new hypermodern and hypertextual tool carefully
orchestrating its specificity from print. What we need is to offer
easily readable texts on all ebook reading devices used by customers,
that could sooner or later use an electronic ink display. And to offer
them as an industry. The digital book is not--and will never be--a
niche product (dictionaries, travel guides, books for the blind): it is
becoming a mass product, with multiple forms, as for the traditional
book." (NEF Interview)

November 2007 > The Kindle from Amazon

Amazon.com launched its own ebook reader, the Kindle, in November 2007.
The Kindle was launched with a catalog of 80,000 ebooks - and new
releases for US $9,99 each. The built-in memory and 2G SD card gave
plenty of book storage (1.4 G), with a screen using the E Ink
technology, and page-turning buttons. Books were directly bought and
downloaded via the device's 3G wireless connection, with no need for a
computer, unlike the Sony Reader. 580.000 Kindles were sold in 2008. A
thinner and revamped Kindle 2 was launched in February 2009, with a
storage capacity of 1,500 ebooks, a new text-to-speech feature, and a
catalog of 230,000 ebooks on Amazon.com's website. The Kindle DX was
launched in  May 2009 with a larger screen that could be more suitable
to read newspapers and magazines.

October 2008 > Google Books versus authors and publishers

The inclusion of copyrighted works in Google Books was widely
criticized by authors and publishers worldwide. In the U.S., lawsuits
were filed by the Authors Guild and the Association of American
Publishers (AAP) for alleged copyright infringement. The assumption was
that the full scanning and digitizing of copyrighted books infringed
copyright laws, even if only snippets were made freely available.
Google replied this was "fair use", referring to short excerpts from
copyrighted books that could be lawfully quoted in another book or
website, as long as the source (author, title, publisher) was
mentioned. After three years of conflict, Google reached a settlement
with the associations of authors and publishers in October 2008, with
an agreement to be signed during the next years.

November 2008 > Europeana, the European digital library

The European Library is first a common portal for 43 national libraries
launched in January 2004 par the CENL (Conference of European National
Librarians) and hosted on the website of the National Library in the
Netherlands. In March 2006, the European Commission launched the
project of a European digital library, after a "call for ideas" from
September to December 2005. This European digital library - named
Europeana--opened its "virtual" doors in November 2008, with two
million documents, and with a crash from the server within 24 hours,
followed by an experimental period giving access  to a partial
collection. Europeana offered 6 million documents in March 2010, with a
revamped website launched then to offer 10 million documents.

April 2010 > The iPad from Apple

Apple launched the iPad, its digital multifunctional tablet, in April
2010 in the U.S. for US$499, with an iBookstore of 60,000 ebooks, and
many more to come from partnerships with publishers. The iPad was
available in a few European countries in June 2010. After the iPod and
the iPhone, two cult devices, Apple has also become a key player for
digital books.

April 2010 > A quote from Catherine Domain

Catherine Domain, founder of the Ulysses bookstore, the oldest travel
bookstore in the world, has become a publisher of travel books in April
2010. She wrote in an email: "The internet has taken more and more
space in my life! On April 1st I started being a publisher after some
painful training in Photoshop, InDesign and others. This is also great
to see that the political will to keep people in front of their
computers for them not to start a revolution can be defeated by giant
and spontaneous happy hours [in France, through Facebook] with
thousands of people who want to see - and speak with--each other in
person. There will always be unexpected developments to new inventions.
When I started using the internet [in 1999], I really didn't expect to
become a publisher."

July 2010 > End of the Booknology

My warmest thanks to Marc Autret for the term "Booknology" used in a
previous common project.




Copyright (C) 2010 Marie Lebert. All rights reserved.









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