Part 1
A HISTORY OF EBOOKS
MARIE LEBERT
NEF, University of Toronto, 2009
Copyright © 2009 Marie Lebert. All rights reserved.
--- This book is dedicated to all those who kindly answered my questions during ten years, in Europe, in America (the whole continent), in Africa, and in Asia. with many thanks for their time and their friendship. ---
A history of ebooks - also called digital books - from the first ebook in 1971 until now, with Project Gutenberg, Amazon, Adobe, Mobipocket, Google Books, the Internet Archive, and many others. This book is based on 100 interviews conducted worldwide and thousands of hours of web surfing during ten years.
This book is also available in French and Spanish, with a longer and different text. All versions can be found online <http://www.etudes-francaises.net/dossiers/ebook.htm>.
Marie Lebert is a researcher and editor specializing in technology for books, other media, and languages. She is the author of "Technology and Books for All" (in English and French, 2008), "Les mutations du livre" (Mutations of the Book, in French, 2007) and "Le Livre 010101" (The 010101 Book, in French, 2003). Her books are published by NEF (Net des études françaises / Net of French Studies), University of Toronto, Canada, and are freely available online <http://www.etudes- francaises.net>.
Many thanks to Greg Chamberlain, Laurie Chamberlain, Kimberly Chung, Mike Cook, Michael Hart and Russon Wooldridge for revising previous versions of some parts, and many thanks to Al Haines for proofreading this ebook.
TABLE
==== Introduction 1971: Project Gutenberg is the first digital library 1990: The web boosts the internet 1993: The Online Books Page is a list of free ebooks 1994: Some publishers get bold and go digital 1995: Amazon.com is the first main online bookstore 1996: There are more and more texts online 1997: Multimedia convergence and employment 1998: Libraries take over the web 1999: Librarians get digital 2000: Information is available in many languages 2001: Copyright, copyleft and Creative Commons 2002: A web of knowledge 2003: eBooks are sold worldwide 2004: Authors are creative on the net 2005: Google gets interested in ebooks 2006: Towards a world public digital library 2007: We read on various electronic devices 2008: "A common information space in which we communicate" ==== Chronology ==== Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
The book is no longer what it used to be.
The electronic book (ebook) was born in 1971, with the first steps of Project Gutenberg, a digital library for books from public domain. It is nearly 40 years old, already. But this is a short life compared to the 5-century old print book.
The internet went live in 1974, with the creation of the protocol TCP/IP by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn. It began spreading in 1983 as a network for research centers and universities. It got its first boost with the invention of the web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, and its second boost with the release of the first browser Mosaic in 1993. From 1994 onwards, the internet quickly spread worldwide.
In Bookland, people were reluctant, curious or passionate.
The internet didn't bring print media, movies, radio or television to an end. It created its own space as a new medium, to get information, access documents, broaden our knowledge and communicate across borders and languages.
Booksellers began selling books online within and outside their home country, offering excerpts on their websites.
Libraries began creating websites as a "virtual" window, as well as digital libraries stemming from their print collections. Librarians helped patrons to surf on the web without being drowned, and to find the information they needed at a time search engines were less accurate. Library catalogs went online. Union catalogs offered a common point for hundreds and then thousands of catalogs.
Newspapers and magazines began being available online, as well as their archives. Some journals became "only" electronic to skip the costs of print publishing, while offering print on demand. Some newsletters, zines and journals started online from scratch, skipping a print version.
Authors began creating websites to self-publish their work or post it while waiting to find a publisher. Communication with readers became easier through email, forums, chat and instant messaging. Some authors explored new ways of writing, called hypertext literature.
More and more books were published with both a print version and a digital version. Some books were "only" digital. Other books were digitized from print versions.
New online bookstores began selling “only” digital books. Aggregators partnered with publishers to produce and sell digital versions of their books.
People no longer needed to run after information and to worry about living in a remote place with no libraries and bookstores. Information was there, by the numbers, available on our screen, often at no cost.
In 2009, most of us would not be able to work, study, communicate and entertain without connecting with others through the internet.
Here is the "virtual" journey we are going to follow:
1971: Project Gutenberg is the first digital library 1990: The web boosts the internet 1993: The Online Books Page is a list of free ebooks 1994: Some publishers get bold and go digital 1995: Amazon.com is the first main online bookstore 1996: There are more and more texts online 1997: Multimedia convergence and employment 1998: Libraries take over the web 1999: Librarians get digital 2000: Information is available in many languages 2001: Copyright, copyleft and Creative Commons 2002: A web of knowledge 2003: eBooks are sold worldwide 2004: Authors are creative on the net 2005: Google gets interested in ebooks 2006: Towards a world public digital library 2007: We read on various electronic devices 2008: "A common information space in which we communicate"
Unless specified otherwise, quotations are excerpts from NEF interviews <http://www.etudes-francaises.net/entretiens/>.
1971: PROJECT GUTENBERG IS THE FIRST DIGITAL LIBRARY
= [Overview]
The first ebook was available in July 1971, as eText #1 of Project Gutenberg, a visionary project launched by Michael Hart to create electronic versions of literary works and disseminate them worldwide. In the 16th century, Gutenberg allowed anyone to have print books for a small cost. In the 21st century, Project Gutenberg would allow anyone to have a digital library at no cost. Its critics long considered Project Gutenberg as impossible on a large scale. But Michael went on keying book after book during many years, with the occasional help of some volunteers. Project Gutenberg got its first boost with the invention of the web in 1990 and its second boost with the creation of Distributed Proofreaders in 2000, to help digitizing books from public domain. In 2008, Project Gutenberg had a production rate of 340 new books each month, 40 mirror sites worldwide, and books being downloaded by the tens of thousands every day. There have been Project Gutenberg websites in the U.S, in Australia, in Europe and in Canada, with more websites to come in other countries.
= From 1971 until now
# Beginning
As recalled by Michael Hart in January 2009 in an email interview: "On July 4, 1971, while still a freshman at the University of Illinois (UI), I decided to spend the night at the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the UI Materials Research Lab, rather than walk miles home in the summer heat, only to come back hours later to start another day of school. I stopped on the way to do a little grocery shopping to get through the night, and day, and along with the groceries they put in the faux parchment copy of 'The U.S. Declaration of Independence' that became quite literally the cornerstone of Project Gutenberg. That night, as it turned out, I received my first computer account - I had been hitchhiking on my brother's best friend's name, who ran the computer on the night shift. When I got a first look at the huge amount of computer money I was given, I decided I had to do something extremely worthwhile to do justice to what I had been given. This was such a serious, and intense thought process for a college freshman, my first thought was that I had better eat something to get up enough energy to think of something worthwhile enough to repay the cost of all that computer time. As I emptied out groceries, the faux parchment Declaration of Independence fell out, and the light literally went on over my head like in the cartoons and comics... I knew what the future of computing, and the internet, was going to be... 'The Information Age.' The rest, as they say, is history."
Michael decided to search the books from public domain available in our libraries, digitize these books, and store the electronic books (ebooks) in the simplest way, using the low set of ASCII - called Plain Vanilla ASCII - for them to be read on any hardware and software. A book would become a continuous text file instead of a set of pages, with caps for the terms in italic, bold or underlined of the print version. As a text file, a book would be easily copied, indexed, searched, analyzed and compared with other books. (Doing such searches is much harder in various markup formats.)
Project Gutenberg's mission would be the following: to put at everyone's disposal, in electronic versions, as many literary works from public domain as possible for free. Years later, in August 1998, Michael wrote in an email interview: "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."
After keying in "The U.S. Declaration of Independence" in 1971, Michael typed in "The U.S. Bill of Rights" in 1972. A volunteer typed in "The United States Constitution" in 1973.
# Persevering
From one year to the next, disk space was getting larger, by the standards of the time - there was no hard disk yet -, making it possible to store larger files. Volunteers began typing in the Bible, with one individual book at a time, and a file for each book. Michael typed in the collected works of Shakespeare, with the help of volunteers, one play at a time, and a file for each play. This edition of Shakespeare was never released, unfortunately, due to changes in copyright law. Shakespeare's works belong to public domain, but comments and notes may be copyrighted, depending on the publication date. Other editions of Shakespeare from public domain were posted a few years later.
# 10 to 1,000 ebooks
In August 1989, Project Gutenberg completed its 10th ebook, "The King James Bible" (1769), both testaments, and 5 M for all files.
In 1990, there were 250,000 internet users. The web was in its infancy. The standard was 360 K disks.
In January 1991, Michael typed in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (1865), by Lewis Carroll. In July 1991, he typed in "Peter Pan" (1904), by James M. Barrie. These two classics of childhood literature each fit on one disk.
The first browser, Mosaic, was released in November 1993. It became easier to circulate etexts and recruit volunteers. From 1991 to 1996, the number of ebooks doubled every year, with one book per month in 1991, two books per month in 1992, four books per month in 1993, and eight books per month in 1994.
In January 1994, Project Gutenberg released "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare" as eBook #100. Shakespeare wrote most works between 1590 and 1613.
The steady growth went on, with an average of 8 books per month in 1994, 16 books per month in 1995, and 32 books per month in 1996.
In June 1997, Project Gutenberg released "The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood" (1883), by Howard Pyle.
Project Gutenberg had 1,000 ebooks in August 1997. eBook #1000 was "La Divina Commedia" de Dante Alighieri (1321), in Italian, its original language.
As there were more and more ebooks, they got classified in three main sections: (a) "Light Literature", such as "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland", "Through the Looking-Glass", "Peter Pan" and "Aesop's Fables"; (b) "Heavy Literature", such as the Bible, Shakespeare's works, "Moby Dick" and "Paradise Lost"; (c) "Reference Literature", such as "Roget's Thesaurus", almanacs, and a set of encyclopedias and dictionaries. (This classification in three sections was replaced later with a more detailed one.)
"Light Literature" was the main section in number of ebooks. As explained on the website in 1998, "The Light Literature Collection is designed to get persons to the computer in the first place, whether the person may be a pre-schooler or a great-grandparent. We love it when we hear about kids or grandparents taking each other to an etext of 'Peter Pan' when they come back from watching Hook at the movies, or when they read 'Alice in Wonderland' after seeing it on TV. We have also been told that nearly every Star Trek movie has quoted current Project Gutenberg etext releases (from 'Moby Dick' in 'The Wrath of Khan'; a Peter Pan quote finishing up the most recent, etc.) not to mention a reference to 'Through the Looking-Glass' in JFK. This was a primary concern when we chose the books for our libraries. We want people to be able to look up quotations they heard in conversation, movies, music, other books, easily with a library containing all these quotations in an easy-to- find etext format."
Project Gutenberg has selected books intended for the general public. It has not focused on providing authoritative editions. "We do not write for the reader who cares whether a certain phrase in Shakespeare has a ':' or a ';' between its clauses. We put our sights on a goal to release etexts that are 99.9% accurate in the eyes of the general reader. Given the preferences our proofreaders have, and the general lack of reading ability the public is currently reported to have, we probably exceed those requirements by a significant amount. However, for the person who wants an 'authoritative edition' we will have to wait some time until this becomes more feasible. We do, however, intend to release many editions of Shakespeare and the other classics for comparative study on a scholarly level."
In August 1998, Michael Hart wrote in an email interview: "My own personal goal is to put 10,000 etexts on the net [this goal was reached in October 2003] and if I can get some major support, I would like to expand that to 1,000,000 and to also expand our potential audience for the average etext from 1.x% of the world population to over 10%, thus changing our goal from giving away 1,000,000,000,000 etexts to 1,000 times as many, a trillion and a quadrillion in U.S. terminology."
# 1,000 to 10,000 ebooks
From 1998 to 2000, the "output" was an average of 36 books per month.
Project Gutenberg reached 2,000 ebooks in May 1999. eBook #2000 was "Don Quijote" (1605), by Cervantes, in Spanish, its original language.
Project Gutenberg reached 3,000 ebooks in December 2000. eBook #3000 was "A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs" (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower), vol. 3 (1919), by Marcel Proust, in French, its original language.
Project Gutenberg reached 4,000 ebooks in October 2001. eBook #4000 was "The French Immortals Series" (1905), in English. This book is an anthology of short fictions by authors from the French Academy (Académie française): Emile Souvestre, Pierre Loti, Hector Malot, Charles de Bernard, Alphonse Daudet, and others.
Project Gutenberg reached 5,000 ebooks in April 2002. eBook #5000 was "The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci" (early 16th century). Since its release, this ebook has stayed in the Top 100 of downloaded books.
In 1988, Michael Hart chose to type in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and "Peter Pan" because they would each fit on one 360 K disk, the standard of the time. In 2002, the standard disk was 1.44 M and could be compressed as a ZIP file.
A practical file size is about 3 million characters, more than long enough for the average book. The ASCII version of a 300- page novel is 1 M. A bulky book can fit in two ASCII files, that can be downloaded as is or in ZIP format. An average of 50 hours is necessary to get an ebook selected, copyright-cleared, scanned, proofread, formatted and assembled.
A few numbers are reserved for "special" books. For example, eBook #1984 is reserved for George Orwell's classic, published in 1949, and still a long way from falling into public domain.
The "output" in 2001 and 2002 was an average of 100 books per month.
In spring 2002, Project Gutenberg's ebooks represented 25% of all the public domain works freely available on the web, an impressive result if we think of all the pages that were scanned and proofread by thousands of volunteers in several countries.
1,000 ebooks in August 1997, 2,000 ebooks in May 1999, 3,000 ebooks in December 2000, 4,000 ebooks in October 2001, 5,000 ebooks in April 2002, 10,000 ebooks in October 2003. eBook #10000 was The Magna Carta, signed in 1215 and known as the first English constitutional text.
From April 2002 to October 2003, in 18 months, the collections doubled, going from 5,000 ebooks to 10,000 ebooks, with a monthly average of 300 new ebooks. The fast growth was the work of Distributed Proofreaders, a website launched in October 2000 by Charles Franks to share the proofreading of books between many volunteers. Volunteers choose one of the books available on the site and proofread a given page. It is recommended they do a page per day if possible.
Books were also copied on CDs and DVDs. As blank CDs and DVDs cost next to nothing, Project Gutenberg began burning and sending a free CD or DVD to anyone asking for it. People were encouraged to make copies for a friend, a library or a school. Released in August 2003, the "Best of Gutenberg" CD contained 600 ebooks. The first Project Gutenberg DVD was released in December 2003 to celebrate the first 10,000 ebooks, with the burning of most titles (9,400 ebooks).
# 10,000 to 20,000 ebooks
In December 2003, there were 11,000 ebooks, which represented 110 G, in several formats (ASCII, HTML, PDF and others, as is or zipped). In May 2004, there were 12,600 ebooks, with represented 135 G. With more than 300 new books added per month (338 books per month in 2004), the number of gigabytes was expected to double every year.
The Project Gutenberg Consortia Center (PGCC) was affiliated with Project Gutenberg in 2003, and became an official Project Gutenberg site. Since 1997, PGCC had been working on gathering collections of existing ebooks, as a complement to Project Gutenberg focusing on the production of ebooks.
In January 2005, Project Gutenberg had 15,000 ebooks. eBook #15000 was "The Life of Reason" (1906), by George Santayana.
What about languages? There were ebooks in 25 languages in February 2004, and in 42 languages in July 2005, including Sanskrit and the Mayan languages. The seven top languages - with more than 50 books - were English (with 14,548 ebooks on July 27, 2005), French (577 ebooks), German (349 ebooks), Finnish (218 ebooks), Dutch (130 ebooks), Spanish (103 ebooks), and Chinese (69 ebooks). There were ebooks in 50 languages in December 2006. The ten top languages were English (with 17,377 books on December 16, 2006), French (966 books), German (412 books), Finnish (344 books), Dutch (244 books), Spanish (140 books), Italian (102 books), Chinese (69 books), Portuguese (68 books), and Tagalog (51 books).
Project Gutenberg was also spreading worldwide.
In July 2005, Project Gutenberg Australia (launched in 2001) had 500 ebooks.
In Europe, Project Rastko, based in Belgrade, Serbia, launched Distributed Proofreaders Europe (DP Europe) in December 2003 and Project Gutenberg Europe (PG Europe) in January 2004. Project Gutenberg Europe released its first 100 ebooks in June 2005. These books were in several languages, as a reflection of European linguistic diversity, with 100 languages planned for the long term.
New teams were working on launching Project Gutenberg Canada, Project Gutenberg Portugal and Project Gutenberg Philippines.
In December 2006, Project Gutenberg had 20,000 ebooks. eBook #20000 was the audiobook of "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" (Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, 1869), by Jules Verne, in its English version.
If 32 years were necessary to digitize the first 10,000 books - between July 1971 and October 2003 -, 3 years and 2 months were necessary to digitize the following 10,000 books - between October 2003 and December 2006.
The section Project Gutenberg PrePrints was set up in January 2006 to collect items submitted to Project Gutenberg which were interesting enough to be available online, but not ready yet to be added to the main Project Gutenberg collections, the reason being missing data, low-quality files, formats which were not handy, etc. This new section had 379 files in December 2006.
# Tens of thousands of ebooks
In December 2006, Mike Cook launched Project Gutenberg News as "the news portal for gutenberg.org", a website to complement the existing weekly and monthly newsletters. It has showed for example the weekly, monthly and yearly production stats since 2001.
The weekly production was 24 ebooks in 2001, 47 ebooks in 2002, 79 ebooks in 2003, 78 ebooks in 2004, 58 ebooks in 2005, 80 ebooks in 2006, and 78 ebooks in 2007.
The monthly production was 104 ebooks in 2001, 203 ebooks in 2002, 348 ebooks in 2003, 338 ebooks in 2004, 252 ebooks in 2005, 345 ebooks in 2006, and 338 books in 2007.
The yearly production was 1,244 ebooks in 2001, 2,432 ebooks in 2002, 4,176 ebooks in 2003, 4,058 ebooks in 2004, 3,019 ebooks in 2005, 4,141 ebooks in 2006, and 4,049 ebooks in 2007.
Project Gutenberg Australia reached 1,500 ebooks in April 2007.
Project Gutenberg Canada (PGC) was founded on July 1st, 2007, on Canada Day, by Michael Shepard and David Jones. Distributed Proofreaders Canada (DPC) started production in December 2007. There were 100 ebooks in March 2008, in English, French and Italian.
Project Gutenberg sent out 15 million ebooks via CDs and DVDs by snail mail in 2007. A new DVD released in July 2006 included 17,000 ebooks. CD and DVD files have also been generated as ISO files (since 2005) to be downloaded for burning CDs or DVDs on a CD or DVD writer.
Project Gutenberg reached 25,000 books in April 2008. eBook #25000 was "English Book Collectors" (1902), by William Younger Fletcher.
If Gutenberg allowed everyone to get print books at little cost, Project Gutenberg has allowed everyone to get a library of electronic books at no cost on a cheap device like a USB drive.
In February 2009, there were 32,500 Project Gutenberg (PG) ebooks, including the ebooks at PG Australia (1,750 ebooks), PG Europe (600 ebooks) and PG Canada (250 ebooks), with more Project Gutenberg websites to come in other countries. Ten new ebooks have been added per day.
As explained by Michael Hart: "In addition, there is 'PrePrints' where we put anything we don't know for sure will qualify as a PG ebook. This gets instant exposure, and was created to help keep things flowing. There are 2,020 ebooks available at PrePrints. The Project Gutenberg Consortia Center (PGCC) has over 75,000 ebooks rendered as PDF files. The difference? These files were prepared by other eLibraries, not Project Gutenberg, and are using our worldwide distribution network to be seen. Thus, counting these 75,000+ along with our over 32,500 other ebooks, has generated a grand total of over 100,000 ebooks."
= From the past to the future