Part 8

More and more computers connected to the internet were available in schools and at home in the mid-1990s. Teachers began exploring new ways of teaching. Going from print book culture to digital culture was changing relationship to knowledge, and the way both scholars and students were seeing teaching and learning. Print book culture provided stable information whereas digital culture provided "moving" information. During a conference organized by the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) in September 1996, Dale Spender gave a lecture about "Creativity and the Computer Education Industry", with insightful comments on forthcoming trends.

Here are some excerpts:

"Throughout print culture, information has been contained in books - and this has helped to shape our notion of information. For the information in books stays the same - it endures. And this has encouraged us to think of information as stable - as a body of knowledge which can be acquired, taught, passed on, memorised, and tested of course. The very nature of print itself has fostered a sense of truth; truth too is something which stays the same, which endures. And there is no doubt that this stability, this orderliness, has been a major contributor to the huge successes of the industrial age and the scientific revolution. (...)

But the digital revolution changes all this. Suddenly it is not the oldest information - the longest lasting information that is the most reliable and useful. It is the very latest information that we now put the most faith in - and which we will pay the most for. (...) Education will be about participating in the production of the latest information. This is why education will have to be ongoing throughout life and work. Every day there will be something new that we will all have to learn. To keep up. To be in the know. To do our jobs. To be members of the digital community. And far from teaching a body of knowledge that will last for life, the new generation of information professionals will be required to search out, add to, critique, 'play with', and daily update information, and to make available the constant changes that are occurring."

Russon Wooldridge, a professor in the Department of French Studies at the University of Toronto, Canada, wrote in February 2001: "All my teaching makes the most of internet resources (web and email): the two common places for a course are the classroom and the website of the course, where I put all course materials. I have published all my research data of the last 20 years on the web (re-edition of books, articles, texts of old dictionaries as interactive databases, treaties from the 16th century, etc.). I publish proceedings of symposiums, I publish a journal, I collaborate with French colleagues by publishing online in Toronto what they can't publish online at home. In May 2000, I organized an international symposium in Toronto about French studies enhanced by new technologies (Les études françaises valorisées par les nouvelles technologies). (...)

I realize that without the internet I wouldn't have as many activities, or at least they would be very different from the ones I have today. So I don't see the future without them. But it is crucial that those who believe in free dissemination of knowledge make sure that knowledge is not 'eaten' by commercial ventures for them to sell it. What has happened in book publishing in France, in linguistics for example, where you can only find textbooks for schools and exams, should be avoided on the web. You don't go to Amazon.com and the likes to find disinterested science. On my website, I refuse any sponsorship."

= A few leading projects

# MIT OpenCourseWare

The MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative launched by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to put its course materials for free on the web, as a way to promote open dissemination of knowledge. In September 2002, a pilot version was available online with 32 course materials. The website was officially launched in September 2003. 500 course materials were available in March 2004. In May 2006, 1,400 course materials were offered by 34 departments belonging to the five schools of MIT. In November 2007, all 1,800 course materials were available, with 200 new and updated courses per year.

MIT also launched the OpenCourseWare Consortium (OCW Consortium) in November 2005, as a collaboration of educational institutions that were willing to offer free online course materials. One year later, it included the course materials of 100 universities worldwide.

# Public Library of Science

With the internet as a powerful medium to disseminate information, it seems quite outrageous that the results of research - original works requiring many years of efforts - are "squatted" by publishers claiming ownership on these works, and selling them at a high price. The work of researchers is often publicly funded, especially in North America. It would therefore seem appropriate that the scientific community and the general public can freely enjoy the results of such research. In science and medicine for example, more than 1,000 new articles reviewed by peers are published daily.

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) was founded in October 2000 by biomedical scientists Harold Varmus, Patrick Brown and Michael Eisen, from Stanford University, Palo Alto, and University of California, Berkeley. Headquartered in San Francisco, PLoS is a non-profit organization whose mission is to make the world’s scientific and medical literature a public resource in free online archives. Instead of information disseminated in millions of reports and thousands of online journals, a single point would give access to the full content of these articles, with a search engine and hyperlinks between articles.

PLoS posted an open letter requesting the articles presently published by journals to be distributed freely in online archives, and asking researchers to promote the publishers willing to support this project. From October 2000 to September 2002, the open letter was signed by 30,000 scientists from 180 countries. The publishers' answer was much less enthusiastic, although a number of publishers agreed for their articles to be distributed freely immediately after publication, or six months after publication in their journals. But even the publishers who initially agreed to support the project made so many objections that it was finally abandoned.

Another objective of PLoS was to become a publisher while creating a new model of online publishing based on free dissemination of knowledge. In early 2003, PLoS created a non- profit scientific and medical publishing venture to provide scientists and physicians with free high-quality, high-profile journals in which to publish their work. The journals were PLoS Biology (launched in 2003), PLoS Medicine (2004), PLoS Genetics (2005), PLoS Computational Biology (2005), PLoS Pathogens (2005), PLoS Clinical Trials (2006) and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases (2007), the first scientific journal on this topic.

All PLoS articles are freely available online, on the websites of PLoS and in the public archive PubMed Central, run by the National Library of Medicine. The articles can be freely redistributed and reused under a Creative Commons license, including for translations, as long as the author(s) and source are cited. PLoS also launched PLoS ONE, an online forum meant to publish articles on any subject relating to science or medicine.

Three years after the beginning of PLoS as a publisher, PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine have had the same reputation for excellence as the leading journals Nature, Science and The New England Journal of Medicine. PLoS has received financial support from several foundations while developing a viable economic model from fees paid by published authors, advertising, sponsorship, and paid activities organized for PLoS members. PLoS also hopes to encourage other publishers to adopt the open access model, or to convert their existing journals to an open access model.

# Wikipedia

Wikipedia was launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger (Larry resigned later on). It has quickly grown into the largest reference website on the internet, financed by donations, with no advertising. Its multilingual content is free and written collaboratively by people worldwide, who contribute under a pseudonym. Its website is a wiki, which means that anyone can edit, correct and improve information throughout the encyclopedia. The articles stay the property of their authors, and can be freely used according to the GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License).

In December 2004, Wikipedia had 1.3 million articles (by 13,000 contributors) in 100 languages. In December 2006, it had 6 million articles in 250 languages. In May 2007, it had 7 million articles in 192 languages, including 1.8 million articles in English, 589,000 articles in German, 500,000 articles in French, 260,000 articles in Portuguese, and 236,000 articles in Spanish.

Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, founded in June 2003, which has run a number of other projects, beginning with Wiktionary (launched in December 2002) and Wikibooks (launched in June 2003), followed by Wikiquote, Wikisource (texts from public domain), Wikimedia Commons (multimedia), Wikispecies (animals and plants), Wikinews, Wikiversity (textbooks), and Wiki Search (search engine).

# Citizendium

Citizendium was launched in October 2006 as a pilot project to build a new encyclopedia, at the initiative of Larry Sanger, who was the cofounder of Wikipedia (with Jimmy Wales) in January 2001, but resigned later on, over policy and content quality issues. Citizendium - which stands for a "citizen's compendium of everything" - is a wiki project open to public collaboration, but combining "public participation with gentle expert guidance".

The project is experts-led, not experts-only. Contributors use their own names, not anonymous pseudonyms (like in Wikipedia), and they are guided by expert editors. As explained by Larry in his essay "Toward a New Compendium of Knowledge", posted in September 2006: "Editors will be able to make content decisions in their areas of specialization, but otherwise working shoulder-to-shoulder with ordinary authors." There are also constables who make sure the rules are respected.

Citizendium was launched on March 25, 2007, with 1,100 articles, 820 authors and 180 editors. There were 9,800 high- quality articles in January 2009, and 11,800 articles in August 2009. Citizendium also wants to act as a prototype for upcoming large scale knowledge-building projects that would deliver reliable reference, scholarly and educational content.

# Encyclopedia of Life

The Encyclopedia of Life was launched in May 2007 as a global scientific effort to document all known species of animals and plants (1.8 million), including endangered species, and expedite the millions of species yet to be discovered and catalogued (about 8 million).

This collaborative effort is led by several main institutions: Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University, Marine Biological Laboratory, Missouri Botanical Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL). The initial funding came from the MacArthur Foundation (US $10 million) and the Sloan Foundation ($2.5 million). A $100 million funding over ten years will be necessary before self-financing.

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 wants to reach everyone: researchers, teachers, students, pupils, media, policy makers and the general public.

The encyclopedia's honorary chair is Edward Wilson, professor emeritus at Harvard University, who was the first to express the wish for such an encyclopedia, in an essay dated 2002. Five years later, his project could become reality thanks to technology improvements for content aggregators, mash-up, wikis, and large scale content management.

As a consortium of the ten largest life science libraries, 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 DC, and available in the Text Archive section of the Internet Archive.

The Encyclopedia of Life is built on the work of thousands of experts around the globe, in a moderated wiki-style environment, for the general public to be able to contribute. The first pages were available in mid-2008. The encyclopedia should be fully "operational" in 2012 and completed with all known species in 2017. The English version will be translated in several languages by partner organizations. 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.

2003: EBOOKS ARE SOLD WORLDWIDE

= [Overview]

First, publishers began to sell digital versions of their books online, on their own websites or on the new eBookstores of Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com. In 2000, new online bookstores were created to sell "only" digital books (ebooks), like Palm Digital Media (renamed Palm eBook Store), Mobipocket or Numilog. At the same time, publishers were digitizing their books by the hundreds, while the public was getting used to read ebooks on computers, laptops, phones, smartphones and reading devices. 2003 was a turning point in an emerging market. More and more books were published simultaneously as a print book and a digital book, and thousands of new books, beginning with best-sellers, were sold as ebooks in various formats: PDF (to be read on Acrobat Reader, replaced by Adobe Reader), LIT (to be read on Microsoft Reader), PRC (to be read on Mobipocket Reader) and others, with the Open eBook format becoming a standard for ebooks.

= Books, from print to digital

The new online bookstores selling "only" digital books were also called aggregators because they were producing and selling ebooks from many publishers. It took them a few years (at least in Europe) to convince publishers that books should have two versions, print and digital, and to wait for the public to be ready to read on an electronic device, be it a computer, a laptop, a PDA, a mobile phone, a smartphone or a reading device. This emerging market took off in 2003, and more and more books were simultaneously published as a print book and a digital book.

In the 1990s, few people believed digital books would be commonplace in the near future. They thought people would still be attached to print books regardless of whatever happened, remembering this sentence of Robert Downs, a librarian who wrote in the 1980s: "My lifelong love affair with books and reading continues unaffected by automation, computers, and all other forms of the twentieth-century gadgetry." (excerpt from "Books in My Life", Library of Congress, 1985)

In an article published in February 1996 by the Swiss magazine "Informatique-Informations", Pierre Perroud, founder of the digital library Athena, explained that "electronic texts represent an encouragement to reading and a convivial participation to culture dissemination", particularly for textual research and text study. These texts are "a good complement to the print book, which remains irreplaceable when for 'true' reading. (...) The book remains a mysteriously holy companion with profound symbolism for us: we grip it in our hands, we hold it against us, we look at it with admiration; its small size comforts us and its content impresses us; its fragility contains a density we are fascinated by; like man it fears water and fire, but it has the power to shelter man's thoughts from time."

Roberto Hernández Montoya, an editor of the electronic magazine Venezuela Analítica, wrote in September 1998: "The printed text can't be replaced, at least not for the foreseeable future. The paper book is a tremendous 'machine'. We can't leaf through an electronic book in the same way as a paper book. On the other hand electronic use allows us to locate text chains more quickly. In a certain way we can more intensively read the electronic text, even with the inconvenience of reading on the screen. The electronic book is less expensive and can be more easily distributed worldwide (if we don't count the cost of the computer and the internet connection)."

In the 2000s, while many people still prefer reading a print book, more and more readers enjoy reading their ebooks on their notebook, smartphone or any other electronic device. They buy their ebooks online from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Yahoo, Palm, Mobipocket or Numilog.

In March 2000, Numilog was founded by Denis Zwirn near Paris, France, as a company specializing in the distribution of digital books. Numilog launched in September 2000 an online bookstore that became the main French-speaking aggregator of digital books over the years. Numilog has sold books and audiobooks in partnership with a number of publishers, including Gallimard, POL, Le Dilettante, Le Rocher, La Découverte, De Vive Voix, Eyrolles or Pearson Education France. Numilog was bought in May 2008 by Hachette Livre, a leading publishing group.

= Adobe Reader

Adobe launched PDF (Portable Document Format) in June 1993, with Acrobat Reader (free, to read PDF documents) and Adobe Acrobat (for a fee, to make PDF documents). As the "veteran" format, PDF was perfected over the years as a 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 gave the tools to create and view PDF files, in several languages and for several platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux).

In August 2000, Adobe bought Glassbook, a company specializing in digital books software for publishers, booksellers, distributors and libraries. Adobe also partnered with Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com to offer ebooks for the Acrobat Reader and the Glassbook Reader.

In January 2001, Adobe launched the Acrobat eBook Reader (free) and the Adobe Content Server (for a fee).

The Acrobat eBook Reader was used to read PDF files of copyrighted books, while adding notes and bookmarks, getting the book covers in a personal library, and browsing a dictionary.

The Adobe Content Server was intended for publishers and distributors for the packaging, protection, distribution and sale of copyrighted books in PDF format, while managing their access with DRM (Digital Rights Management), according to instructions given by the copyright holder, for example allowing or not the printing and loan of ebooks. (It was replaced with the Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server in November 2004.)

In April 2001, Adobe partnered with Amazon.com, for the online bookstore to include 2,000 copyrighted books for the Acrobat eBook Reader. These were titles of major publishers, travel guides, and children books.

The same year, the Acrobat Reader was available for PDAs, beginning with the Palm Pilot (May 2001) and the Pocket PC (December 2001).

Between 1993 and 2003, over 500 million copies of Acrobat Reader were downloaded worldwide. In 2003, Acrobat Reader was available in many languages and for many platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Palm OS, Pocket PC, Symbian OS, etc.). Approximately 10% of the documents on the internet were available in PDF.

In May 2003, Acrobat Reader (5th version) merged with Acrobat eBook Reader (2nd version) to become Adobe Reader (starting with version 6), which could read both standard PDF files and secure PDF files of copyrighted books.

In late 2003, Adobe opened its own online bookstore, the Digital Media Store, with titles in PDF format from major publishers (HarperCollins, Random House, Simon & Schuster, etc.) as well as electronic versions of newspapers and magazines like The New York Times, Popular Science, etc. Adobe also launched Adobe eBooks Central as a service to read, publish, sell and lend ebooks, and Adobe eBook Library as a prototype digital library.

= Open eBook and ePub

In 1999, there were nearly as many ebook formats as ebooks, with each new company creating its own format for its own ebook reader (software) and its own electronic device, for example the Glassbook Reader, the Peanut Reader, the Rocket eBook Reader (for the Rocket eBook), the Franklin Reader (for the eBookMan), the Cytale ebook reader (for the Cybook), the Gemstar eBook Reader (for the Gemstar eBook), the Palm Reader (for the Palm Pilot), etc.

The digital publishing industry felt the need to work on a common format for ebooks. It released in September 1999 the first version of the Open eBook (OeB) format, based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and defined by the Open eBook Publication Structure (OeBPS). The Open eBook Forum was created in January 2000 to develop the OeB format and OeBPS specifications. Since 2000, most ebook formats were derived from - or are compatible with the OeB format, for example the PRC format from Mobipocket or the LIT format from Microsoft.

In April 2005, the Open eBook Forum became the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). The OeB format was replaced with the ePub format, a global standard for ebooks with PDF. The PDF files created with recent versions of Adobe Acrobat are compatible with the ePub format.

= Microsoft Reader

Microsoft launched the Microsoft Reader in April 2000, for people to read books in LIT (from "literature") format on its new PDA, the Pocket PC. Four months later, in August 2000, the Microsoft Reader was available for computers, and then for any Windows platform, for example the platforms of the Tablets PC launched in November 2002.

Microsoft billed publishers and distributors for the use of its DRM technology through the Microsoft DAS Server, with a commission on each sale. Microsoft also partnered with major online bookstores - Barnes & Noble.com in January 2000 and Amazon.com in August 2000 - for them to offer ebooks for the Microsoft Reader in eBookstores soon to be launched. Barnes & Noble.com opened its eBookstore in August 2000, followed by Amazon in November 2000.

= Mobipocket Reader

Mobipocket was founded in March 2000 in Paris, France, by Thierry Brethes and Nathalie Ting, as a company specializing in ebooks for PDAs. The Mobipocket format (PRC, based on the OeB format) and the Mobipocket Reader were "universal" and could be used on any PDA - and also on any computer from April 2002. They quickly became global standards for ebooks on mobile devices.

In October 2001, the Mobipocket Reader received the eBook Technology Award from the International Book Fair in Frankfurt. Mobipocket partnered with Franklin for the Mobipocket Reader to be available on the eBookMan, Franklin's personal assistant, instead of the initially planned Microsoft Reader.

The Mobipocket Web Companion was a software (for a fee) for extracting content from partner news sites. The Mobipocket Publisher was used by individuals (free version for private use, and standard version for a fee) or publishers (professional version for a fee) to create ebooks using the Mobipocket DRM technology for controlling access to copyrighted ebooks. The Mobipocket Publisher could also create ebooks in LIT format for the Microsoft Reader.

In spring 2003, the Mobipocket Reader was available in several languages (French, English, German, Spanish, Italian) and could be used on any PDA and computer, and 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.

Mobipocket was bought by Amazon in April 2005. It now operates within the Amazon brand, with a multilingual catalog of 70,000 books in 2008.

2004: AUTHORS ARE CREATIVE ON THE NET

= [Overview]