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."
In 1998, The Online Books Page listed more than 7,000 books, which could be browsed by author, by title or by subject. It also listed significant directories and archives of online texts, and special exhibits. From the main search page, users could search four types of media: books, music, art, and video.
The Online Books Page began listing serials. As stated on the website: "Along with books, The Online Books Page is also now listing major archives of serials (such as magazines, published journals, and newspapers), as of June 1998. Serials can be at least as important as books in library research. Serials are often the first places that new research and scholarship appear. They are sources for firsthand accounts of contemporary events and commentary, They are also often the first (and sometimes the only) place that quality literature appears. (For those who might still quibble about serials being listed on a 'books page', back issues of serials are often bound and reissued as hardbound 'books'.)"
The Online Books Page participated in the Experimental Search System of the Library of Congress. It also worked with The Universal Library Project, hosted at Carnegie Mellon University.
In 1999, after graduating from Carnegie Mellon with a Ph.D. in computer science, John moved to work as a digital library planner and researcher at the University of Pennsylvania Library. He also moved The Online Books Page there, and went on expanding it.
1993: PDF
[Overview]
PDF (Portable Document Format) was conceived by Adobe in 1992, launched in June 1993 with Adobe Acrobat software, and perfected over 15 years as the 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 gives the tools to create and view PDF files and is available in many languages and for many platforms (Macintosh, Windows, Unix, etc.). Ten years later, over 500 million copies of PDF-based Adobe Reader (formerly Acrobat Reader, until May 2003) have been downloaded worldwide. Approximately 10% of the documents on the internet are available in PDF.
1994: LIBRARY WEBSITES
[Overview]