Since its inception, the @folio project has received a warm welcome during guest presentations in various book fairs and symposiums in France and Europe, and a warm welcome from the French-speaking media - press, radio, television and internet. An international patent was filed in April 2001. The French startup iCodex was created in July 2002 to promote, develop and market @folio. A few years later, there is still a warm welcome, but yet no funding. In August 2007, the @folio team began seeking funding worldwide. Pierre's passion for a cheap and beautiful reading device intended for everybody - and not just the few - has no boundaries, except some financial ones.
2008: "A COMMON INFORMATION SPACE IN WHICH WE COMMUNICATE"
= [Overview]
Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web in 1989-90, 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 on line, we could then use computers to help us analyse 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). Twenty years after the invention of the web, and ten years after the writing of this text, Tim Berners-Lee's dream and "second part of the dream" have begun to become reality with many participative projects across borders and languages.
= From etexts to ebooks
Michael Hart founded Project Gutenberg in 1971. He wrote in 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."
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."
Ten years later, Peter Schweitzer, inventor of the @folio project, the prototype of a reading device, wrote in an email interview: "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."
Marc Autret, a journalist and graphic designer, wrote around the same time: "I am convinced that the ebook (or "e-book") has a great future in all non-fiction sectors. I refer to the ebook as a software and not as a dedicated physical medium (the conjecture is more uncertain on this point). The [European] publishers of guides, encyclopedias and informative books in general still see the ebook as a very minor variation of the printed book, probably because the business model and secure management don't seem entirely stabilized. But this is a matter of time. Non-commercial ebooks are already emerging everywhere while opening the way to new developments. To my eyes, there are at least two emerging trends: (a) an increasingly attractive and functional interface for reading/consultation (navigation, research, restructuring on the fly, user annotations, interactive quiz); (b) a multimedia integration (video, sound, animated graphics, database) now strongly coupled to the web. No physical book offers such features. So 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 one of a book: the unity and quality of editorial work!"
= Cyberspace and information society