The eBook is 40 (1971-2011)

Produced by Al Haines
THE EBOOK IS 40 (1971-2011)
Marie Lebert
Project Gutenberg News, 2011
The ebook (electronic book) is 40 years old. After humble beginnings, it is firmly standing alongside the print book. We now read ebooks on our computers, PDAs, mobile phones, smartphones and ebook readers.
“The ebook is 40” is a chronology in 44 episodes from 1971 to 2011. Unless specified otherwise, the quotes are excerpts from the NEF Interviews <www.etudes-francaises.net/entretiens/>, University of Toronto, and the interviews that followed as a complement. Many thanks to all those who are quoted here, for their time and their friendship.
Part of this book was published as a series of articles in Project Gutenberg News <www.gutenbergnews.org> in July 2011, to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Project Gutenberg on 4 July 2011.
This book marks the very end of a 12-year research project, with 100 participants worldwide.
Marie Lebert is a researcher and journalist specializing in technology for books and languages. Her books are freely available in Project Gutenberg <www.gutenberg.org>, in various formats for any electronic device.
Copyright © 2011 Marie Lebert
1971 > Project Gutenberg, a visionary project 1974 > The internet “took off” 1990 > The invention of the web 1991 > From ASCII to Unicode 1992 > Homes for electronic texts 1993 > The Online Books Page 1993 > PDF, from past to present 1994 > The internet as a marketing tool 1995 > The print press went online 1995 > Amazon, a pioneer in cybercommerce 1996 > The Internet Archive, for future generations 1996 > Libraries launched websites 1996 > Towards a digital knowledge 1996 > The @folio project, a mobile device for texts 1997 > Multimedia convergence 1997 > A portal for European national libraries 1997 > E Ink, an electronic ink technology 1998 > The Electronic Beowulf Project 1998 > Web-extended commercial books 1998 > A more restrictive copyright law 1998 > The first ebook readers 1999 > Librarians in cyberspace 1999 > The Ulysses Bookstore on the web 1999 > The internet as a novel character 2000 > Encyclopedias and dictionaries 2000 > The web portal yourDictionary.com 2000 > A standard format for ebooks 2000 > Experiments by best-selling authors 2000 > Cotres.net, works of digital literature 2000 > The Gutenberg Bible online 2001 > Broadband became the norm 2001 > Wikipedia, a collaborative encyclopedia 2001 > The Creative Commons license 2003 > Handicapzéro, the internet for everyone 2003 > The Public Library of Science 2004 > The web 2.0, community and sharing 2005 > From PDAs to smartphones 2005 > From Google Print to Google Books 2005 > The Open Content Alliance, a universal library 2006 > The union catalog WorldCat on the web 2007 > The Encyclopedia of Life, a global effort 2007 > The future of ebooks seen from France 2010 > From the Librié to the iPad 2011 > The ebook in ten points