40 Years of E-books

AA O Next Chapter» Home 197 History of E-books 2011 1971 Michael S. Hart launches Project Gutenberg and digitizes the United States Declaration of Independence, which becomes the first e-book in the world. This year the first e-mail is sent between two host computers. Number of Books Digitized by Project Gutenberg 40,000 33,000 30,000 20,000 10,000 10,000 1,000 100 1971 1989 1994 1997 2003 2011 1985 The Voyager Company, a pioneer in CD-ROM production, is founded. Among published works there are also "expanded books", including Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton and Virtual Light by William Gibson. Commodore launches the Amiga personal computer. 1993 Digital Book, Inc. offers the first 50 digital books in floppy disk with Digital Book Format (DBF). Hugo Award for Best Novel nominee texts published on CD-ROM by Brad Templeton. Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, is released. 1998 First dedicated e-book readers are released: Rocket Ebook and SoftBook. Kim Blagg obtains the first ISBN issued to an e-book and begins to promote multimedia-enhanced e-books on CDs. Google, Inc. is founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. 2000 Stephen King offers his novella Riding the Bullet in digital file; it can only be read on a computer. During the first 24 hours, over 400,000 copies of a book are downloaded. The first Blu-ray Disc prototypes are unveiled. 2002 Random House and HarperCollins start to sell digital versions of their publications. The dot-com bubble bear market reaches bottom. US Trade Wholesale E-book Sales 2002 -2010 in millions of US dollars 500 441.3 400 300 200 100 ఆ2 21 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2005 Bookboon.com is launched, allowing people to download free textbooks and travel guide e-books. Microsoft releases the Xbox 360. 2007 Amazon launches Kindle in US. There are over 90,000 e-books available in Kindle Store, including 100+ New York Times bestsellers. The first generation of iPhone is launched by Apple. Launch Prices of Kindle in US dollars $399 $359 $139 Kindle 1 Kindle 2 Kindle 3 Nov 19, 2007 Feb 23, 2009 Aug 27, 2010 Europeana, a collection of European digital libraries with 2008 digitised paintings, books and films, is officially launched. BooksOnBoard starts to sell e-books for iPhones. Facebook hits 100 million users 2009 Amazon announces the international version of Kindle 2, ships to 169 countries. Barnes&Noble introduces Nook in US. The English language Wikipedia passes the 3,000,000 article mark. 2010 Apple releases the iPad with iBooks/iBookstore. Amazon reports that for the first time its e-book sales outnumbered sales of hardcover books. Google eBookstore opens with 3 million titles. The global e-book market grows by 200% to reach $900 million. Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-book http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29801 http://www.publishers.org/main/PressCenter/Archicves/2011_Feb/DecemberStatsPressRelease.htm http://trillian.randomstuff.org.uk/-stephen//history/timeline-INDEX.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_popular_Internet_services http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_communication_technology http://www.futuresource-consulting.com/press.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Kindle ef ebookfriend.ly