An ebook (short for "electronic book"), also spelled as e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in electronic form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices.Gardiner, Eileen and Ronald G. Musto. "The Electronic Book." In Suarez, Michael Felix, and H. R. Woudhuysen. The Oxford Companion to the Book. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 164. Some trace the concept of an e-reader, a device that would enable the user to view books on a screen, to a 1930 manifesto by Bob Brown titled The Readies,. in which he correctly predicted the miniaturization and portability of e-readers, writing that such a machine would allow readers to adjust the size of the text.
The inventor of the first ebook is not widely agreed upon. One candidate is Roberto Busa, the creator of the Index Thomisticus, a digital humanities project he initiated in 1946 that created a concordance to 179 texts centering around the works of Thomas Aquinas. In 1949 Ángela Ruiz Robles, a teacher from Ferrol, Spain, patented the Enciclopedia Mecánica (), a mechanical device which operated on compressed air where text and graphics were contained on spools that users would load onto rotating spindles.
Some historians consider electronic books to have started in the early 1960s with the NLS project headed by Douglas Engelbart at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and the Hypertext Editing System and FRESS projects headed by Andries van Dam at Brown University... FRESS documents were formatted dynamically for different users, display hardware, window sizes, and so on, as well as having automated tables of contents, indexes, etc. All these systems also provided extensive hyperlinking, graphics, and other capabilities, and Van Dam is generally thought to have coined the term "electronic book"...
Several publications report Michael S. Hart as the inventor of the ebook, who planned to create documents using plain text to make them as easy as possible to download and view on devices. His work led to the launch of Project Gutenberg, an online ebook library.
Dedicated hardware devices for ebook reading began to appear in the 70s and 80s. One early ebook implementation was the desktop prototype for a proposed notebook computer, the Dynabook, in the 1970s at PARC.Personal Dynamic Media – By Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg In 1987 the Department of Defense finished tests on four prototypes from Texas Instruments for the Portable Electronic Aid for Maintenance (PEAM) project, a portable electronic delivery device for technical maintenance information. In 1992, Sony launched the Data Discman, an electronic book reader that could read ebooks that were stored on CDs. In 1993, Paul Baim released a freeware HyperCard stack, called EBook, that allowed easy import of any text file to create a pageable version similar to an electronic paperback book, which allowed users to quickly return to the last page they read after leaving, and the stack's name may have popularized the term "ebook".
The publication of ebooks gained support from major software companies, with Adobe introducing the PDF format in 1993. The Open eBook format, developed by the Open eBook Forum and endorsed by Microsoft, was released in September 1999. It was soon superseded by the EPUB format, which became an official standard in 2007. EPUB provides pagination and allows text content to be reflowable even as parameters like font size are changed by the reader.
The first commercially available ebook readers or "e-readers" were launched in 1998: the Rocket eBook and the SoftBook Reader by SoftBook. Sony released the first e-reader to use an E Ink screen in 2004. Electronic paper screen technologies like E Ink mimic the appearance of ink on paper by reflecting ambient light, allowing for greater energy efficiency and a more comfortable reading experience. Beyond e-readers, ownership of tablet computers among online consumers in the United States jumped from 5% in 2011 to 44% in 2014.
With the rise of e-readers, authors with books that were not accepted by publishers offered their works online so they could be seen by others. In 2010, a Public Library Funding and Technology Access Study by the American Library Association found that 66% of public libraries in the U.S. were offering ebooks, and a large movement in the library industry began to seriously examine the issues relating to ebook lending, acknowledging a "tipping point" when ebook technology would become widely established."At the Tipping Point: Four voices probe the top e-book issues for librarians." Library Journal, August 2010 By January 2011, ebook sales at Amazon had surpassed its paperback sales. In 2014, The New York Times predicted that by 2018 ebooks will make up over 50% of total consumer publishing revenue in the United States and Great Britain.
Before the 1980s
Ángela Ruiz Robles invents the Mechanical Encyclopedia, in Galicia, Spain. Roberto Busa is sponsored by IBM to compile the Index Thomisticus.
Douglas Engelbart starts the NLS (and later Augment) projects.
c. 1965
Andries van Dam starts the HES (and later FRESS) projects, with assistance from Ted Nelson, to develop and use electronic textbooks for humanities and in pedagogy.
1971
Michael S. Hart types the US Declaration of Independence into a computer to create the first ebook available on the Internet and launches Project Gutenberg in order to create electronic copies of more books.
c. 1979
Roberto Busa finishes the Index Thomisticus, a complete lemmatization of the 56 printed volumes of Saint Thomas Aquinas and of a few related authors.
1980s and 1990s
1980
The United States Department of Defense (DoD) begins work on the Portable Electronic Aid for Maintenance (PEAM).
1985
Texas Instruments applies for a patent for a device developed as part of the PEAM program, titled "Apparatus for delivering procedural type instructions", listing John K. Harkins and Stephen H. Morriss as the inventors.
1986
Judy Malloy writes and programs the first online hypertext fiction, Uncle Roger, with links that take the narrative in different directions depending on the reader's choice. Texas Instruments delivers its prototypes for the PEAM to the DoD.
1989
Franklin Computer releases an electronic edition of the Bible that can only be read with a stand-alone device.Religion: High-Tech Bible Time
1990
Eastgate Systems publishes the first hypertext fiction released on floppy disk, afternoon, a story, by Michael Joyce.Gutermann, Jimmy, 'Hypertext Before the Web,' Chicago Tribune, April 8, 1999 Electronic Book Technologies releases DynaText, the first SGML-based system for delivering large-scale books such as aircraft technical manuals. It was later tested on a US aircraft carrier as a replacement for paper manuals. Sony launches the Data Discman e-book player.電子書籍端末ショーケース：DATA Discman――ソニー February 25, 2012, ITmedia eBook USER
1991
Voyager Company develops Expanded Books, which are books on CD-ROM in a digital format.
1992
F. Crugnola and I. Rigamonti design and create the first e-reader, called Incipit, as a thesis project at the Polytechnic University of Milan. Apple starts using its Doc Viewer format "to distribute documentation to developers in an electronic form", which effectively meant Inside Macintosh books.
1993
Peter James publishes his novel Host on two floppy disks, which at the time was called the "world's first electronic novel", a copy of it is stored at the Science Museum. Hugo Award and Nebula Award nominee works are included on a CD-ROM by Brad Templeton. Launch of Bibliobytes, a website for obtaining e-books, both for free and for sale on the Internet.Ebook timeline January 3, 2002. Paul Baim releases the EBook 1.0 HyperCard stack that allows the user to easily convert any text file into a HyperCard based pageable book.
1994
C & M Online is founded in Raleigh, North Carolina and begins publishing ebooks through its imprint, Boson Books; authors include Fred Chappell, Kelly Cherry, Leon Katz, Richard Popkin, and Robert Rodman. More than two dozen volumes of Inside Macintosh are published together on a single CD-ROM in Apple Doc Viewer format. Apple subsequently switches to using Adobe Acrobat. The popular format for publishing ebooks changes from plain text to HTML.
1995
Online poet Alexis Kirke discusses the need for wireless internet electronic paper readers in his article "The Emuse".
1996
Project Gutenberg reaches 1,000 titles. Joseph Jacobson works at MIT to create electronic ink, a high-contrast, low-cost, read/write/erase medium to display ebooks.
1997
E Ink Corporation is co-founded by MIT undergraduates J.D. Albert, Barrett Comiskey, MIT professor Joseph Jacobson, as well as Jeremy Rubin and Russ Wilcox to create an electronic printing technology. This technology is later used on the displays of the Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Amazon Kindle.
1998
Nuvo Media releases the first handheld e-reader, the Rocket eBook. SoftBook launches its SoftBook reader. This e-reader, with expandable storage, could store up to 100,000 pages of content, including text, graphics and pictures. The Cybook is sold and manufactured at first by Cytale (1998–2003) and later by Bookeen.
1999
The NIST releases the Open eBook format based on XML to the public domain; most future ebook formats derive from Open eBook. Publisher Simon & Schuster creates a new imprint called iBooks and becomes the first trade publisher to simultaneously publish some of its titles in ebook and print format. Oxford University Press makes a selection of its books available as ebooks through netLibrary. Publisher Baen Books opens up the Baen Free Library to make available Baen titles as free ebooks. Kim Blagg, via her company Books OnScreen, begins selling multimedia-enhanced ebooks on CDs through retailers including Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Borders.
2000s
2000
Joseph Jacobson, Barrett O. Comiskey and Jonathan D. Albert are granted US patents related to displaying electronic books; these patents are later used in the displays for most e-readers. Stephen King releases his novella Riding the Bullet exclusively online and it became the first mass-market ebook, selling 500,000 copies in 48 hours. Microsoft releases the Microsoft Reader with ClearType for increased readability on PCs and handheld devices."Microsoft Reader August 2000 Microsoft and Amazon work together to sell ebooks that can be purchased on Amazon, and using Microsoft software downloaded to PCs and handhelds. A digitized version of the Gutenberg Bible is made available online at the British Library.
2001
Adobe releases Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 allowing users to underline, take notes and bookmark.
2002
Palm, Inc and OverDrive, Inc make Palm Reader e-books available worldwide, offering over 5,000 ebooks in several languages; these could be read on Palm PDAs or using a computer application. Random House and HarperCollins start to sell digital versions of their titles in English.
2004
Sony Librie, the first e-reader using an E Ink display is released; it has a six-inch screen. Google announces plans to digitize the holdings of several major libraries, as part of what would later be called the Google Books Library Project.
2005
Amazon buys Mobipocket, the creator of the mobi e-book file format and e-reader software. Google is sued for copyright infringement by the Authors Guild for scanning books still in copyright.
2006
Sony Reader PRS-500, with an E Ink screen and two weeks of battery life, is released.. LibreDigital launches BookBrowse as an online reader for publisher content.
2007
The International Digital Publishing Forum releases EPUB to replace Open eBook.