EBooks
Believe it or not the beginning of e-books started in 1971 with Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg was founded by Michael Hart who felt is was important that “important texts were freely available to everyone in the world.” According to promo.net2. The very first ebook publication produced was the United States Declaration of Independence, according to Michael Sauers, Technology Innovation Librarian3. His vision was a success. The Gutenberg Project is still available online with over 30,000 free e-texts, over 1,900 or which were produced just last year.
After the Gutenberg Project there wasn’t much more exploration for about 20 years. In 1993 Steve Jobs, before he was Apple, produced The NeXT which was the first computer with ebooks installed on it, including the complete works of Shakespeare and the Oxford Dictionary. Then in 1999 the very first portable ereader came to the world. They called it the Franklin EB-500 Rocket. It was about the size of a paper book but could store approximately 4,000 pages, or 10 books. Then in 2002 there was another big move. The Palm Treo. While the Treo wasn’t advertised as an ereader and was infact a cell phone, it did have e-reader capabilities.
January 2006 a big breakthrough really hit the ereader market in the United States. At 800 x 600 res, 64mb solid state storage, and a whopping 9oz, Sony’s E-reader PRS-500 presented the first E-ink, Electronic Ink4, e-reader in the US. E-ink is an electronically activated ink placed in the ereader screen. In June of the following year, as many of us remember, Apple came out with the Ipod Touch and Iphone, which again were not specifically e-readers but had e-reader capabilities, and were also not eink based, they had a LCD screen. Within months of the same year the well known Amazon Kindle came out, which was advertised as an ereader, was eink based, and also included a Qwerty Keyboard, which is the same style of Keyboard most of your computers carry. 2009 produced both the Amazon Kindle 2 and the new Barnes & Nobles Nook, which uses eink but also was the first e-reader to be android based, using Android 1.5. From then, nothing major has been improved on for the ebook/ ereader world. The most recent ereaders are merely updates of the previous:
- Kindle
- Nook
- Ipad
- etc.
