A History Of The Ebook
I’m excited to have SimoleonSense back on track. The article below is on the history of ebooks. You might be interested to learn about this medium before you run to the store and buy a Kindle. Click Here For Comprehensive Guide On Ebooks
Article introduction (via Oculture)
A quick fyi: Mark Glaser at PBS’s MediaShift has just published a handy guide to e-books. It covers the history of e-books, the competing e-book readers, the pros and cons of working with e-books, what Google and Apple are now doing in this space, and more. Good stuff. Separately, I also wanted to flag a collection that features e-texts of 100 major literary classics. You’ll find it over at universitiesandcolleges.org.
Background Via PBS (via PBS)
E-books are electronic books, or books you can read on your computer or on handheld devices such as e-readers or smartphones. The first e-book was likely created by Michael Hart at the University of Illinois in 1971, when he typed in the text of the U.S. Declaration of Independence onto an early version of the Internet. Hart founded the Gutenberg Project, an online collection of e-books that are taken from public domain books. The collection has grown into more than 27,000 e-books, available for free download, along with audio books and digitized sheet music.
In the ’90s, there was a proliferation of e-book reader devices, such as the $500 RocketBook from NuvoMedia. The problem was that many of these devices read e-books only in certain file formats, had short battery life and had screens that you couldn’t read in bright light — at the beach, for instance. On a parallel track, companies such as Peanut Press were offering up e-books for people to read on devices they already owned, such as Palm Pilots and other personal digital assistants (PDAs).
