The encyclopedia's honorary chair is Edward Wilson, professor emeritus at Harvard University, who, in an essay dated 2002, was the first to express the wish for such an encyclopedia. Technology improvements made it possible five years later, with content aggregators, mash-up, wikis, and large scale content management.
Based on the work of thousands of experts around the globe, 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. As a teaching and learning tool for a better understanding of our planet, the encyclopedia will reach everyone: researchers, teachers, students, pupils, media, policy makers, and the general public, who will be able to contribute in a wiki-style environment, with contributions checked by experts.
As a consortium of the ten largest life science libraries, with other libraries to join in the future, the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) started the digitization of 2 million documents from public domain spanning over 200 years. In May 2007, when the project was officially launched, 1.25 million pages were already digitized in London, Boston and Washington D.C., and available in the Internet Archive.
The first pages of the encyclopedia were designed in 2007, and available in mid-2008. The encyclopedia should be fully "operational" in 2012 and completed with all known species in 2017. People will be able to use the encyclopedia as a "macroscope" to identify major trends from a considerable stock of information — in the same way they use a microscope for the study of detail. The English version will be translated in several languages by partner organizations.
2007 > THE FUTURE OF EBOOKS SEEN FROM FRANCE
[Summary] Marc Autret, a journalist and graphic designer, wrote in December 2006: "I am convinced that the ebook 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). (…) 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 given format. How valuable will it be? Its value will be the one of a book: the unity and quality of editorial work!"
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In late 2006, I launched an inquiry about how people were seeing the future of ebooks. Here are the answers from Pierre Schweitzer, Denis Zwirn and Marc Autret, three French “pioneers” in their own fields.
Pierre Schweitzer is the inventor of the @folio project, a mobile device for texts. He wrote in December 2006: "The luck we all have is to live this fantastic change here and now. When I was born in 1963, a computer memory could only hold a few pages of characters. 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."
Denis Zwirn is the founder of Numilog, the main French-language digital bookstore. He 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 the print book. We need to offer books that can be easily read on any electronic device used by customers, sooner or later with 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 market product, with multiple forms, like the traditional book."