December 1999 > Two main 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. It was searchable 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, available for an annual subscription fee, with a number of articles also available for free.
January 2000 > The Million Book Project, to digitize one million books
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, with one million books available on the university website, as image files in DjVu and TIFF formats, and 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, a portal for linguistic tools in all languages
Robert Beard, a professor at Bucknell University (USA), co-founded yourDictionary.com in February 2000, as a follow-up of his first website, A Web of Online Dictionaries (included in the new one), launched in 1995 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. 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 offered the Endangered Language Repository.
March 2000 > The Oxford English Dictionary online
The online version (for a subscription fee) of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was launched in March 2000 by the Oxford University Press (OUP). Since then, the website has offered a quarterly update of the online dictionary, with around 1,000 new or revised entries each time. In March 2002, two years after this first experience, the Oxford University Press launched Oxford Reference Online (ORO), a comprehensive encyclopedia designed directly for the web, and also available for a subscription fee. Its 60,000 webpages and one million entries could represent the equivalent of 100 print encyclopedias.
March 2000 > Mobipocket, a company specializing in 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 then 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. Bought by Amazon in April 2005, Mobipocket presently operates within the Amazon brand, with a multilingual catalog of 70,000 books in 2008.