Timeline of ebooks

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.^[1] 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,^[2] 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.^[3]

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.^[4][5][6] In 1949 Ángela Ruiz Robles, a teacher from Ferrol, Spain, patented the Enciclopedia Mecánica (transl. Mechanical Encyclopedia), a mechanical device which operated on compressed air where text and graphics were contained on spools that users would load onto rotating spindles.^[7]

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.^[8][9][10] 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".^[11][12]

Several publications report Michael S. Hart as the inventor of the ebook,^[13][14][15] 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.^[14]

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.^[16] 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.^[17] In 1992, Sony launched the Data Discman, an electronic book reader that could read ebooks that were stored on CDs.^[18] 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".^[19]

The publication of ebooks gained support from major software companies, with Adobe introducing the PDF format in 1993.^[20] The Open eBook format, developed by the Open eBook Forum and endorsed by Microsoft, was released in September 1999.^[21] It was soon superseded by the EPUB format, which became an official standard in 2007.^[22] EPUB provides pagination and allows text content to be reflowable even as parameters like font size are changed by the reader.^[23]

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,^[24] allowing for greater energy efficiency and a more comfortable reading experience.^[25] Beyond e-readers, ownership of tablet computers among online consumers in the United States jumped from 5% in 2011 to 44% in 2014.^[26][27]

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.^[28] 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,^[29] 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.^[30] By January 2011, ebook sales at Amazon had surpassed its paperback sales.^[31] 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.^{[32][needs update]}