Part 1 (1/2)
Technology and Books for All
by Marie Lebert
INTRODUCTION
Michael Hart, who founded Project Gutenberg in 1971, wrote: ”We consider eText to be a new medium, with no real relationshi+p to paper, other than presenting the same material, but I don't see how paper can possibly compete once people each find their own comfortable way to eTexts, especially in schools” (excerpt froust 1998)
Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web in 1989-90, wrote: ”The dream behind the web is of a co information Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished There was a second part of the dreaenerally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which ork and play and socialize That was that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyse it, , where we individually fit in, and hoe can better work together” (excerpt from: The World Wide Web: A Very Short Personal History, May 1998)
John Mark Ockerbloootten very interested in the great potential the net had forliterature available to a wide audience () I am very excited about the potential of the internet as ayears I'd also like to stay involved, one way or another, inbooks available to a wide audience for free via the net, whether I make this explicitly part of my professional career, or whether I just do it as a spare-time volunteer” (excerpt from a NEF interview, Septe to follow:
1968: ASCII is a 7-bit coded character set
1971: Project Gutenberg is the first digital library
1974: The internet takes off
1977: UNIMARC is set up as a coraphic format
1984: Copyleft is a new license for computer software
1990: The web takes off
1991: Unicode is a universal double-byte character set
1993: The Online Books Page is a list of free eBooks
1993: The PDF format is launched by Adobe
1994: The first library website goes online
1994: Publishers put some of their books online for free
1995: Amazoncom is the first oes online
1996: The Palm Pilot is the first PDA
1996: The Internet Archive is founded to archive the web
1996: Teachers explore neays of teaching
1997: Online publishi+ng begins spreading
1997: The Logos Dictionary goes online for free
1997: Multience is the topic of an international syo online
1999: Librarians becoual
1999: The Open eBook forital
2000: yourDictionarycooes online
2000: Distributed Proofreaders digitizes books from public domain
2000: The Public Library of Science (PLoS) works on free online journals