eBooks: 1993 – The Online Books Page

History
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In 1993, John Mark Ockerbloom created The Online Books Page as “a website that facilitates access to books that are freely readable over the internet.” The web was still in its infancy, with Mosaic as its first browser. John Mark Ockerbloom was a graduate student at the School of Computer Science (CS) of Carnegie Mellon […]

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eBooks: 1992 – Homes for electronic texts

History
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The first homes for electronic texts were the Etext Archives, founded in 1992 by Paul Southworth, and the E-Zine-List, founded in 1993 by John Labovitz, among others. The first electronic texts were mostly political. They were followed by electronic zines, that also covered cultural topics. What exactly is a zine? John Labovitz explained on its […]

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eBooks: 1991 – From ASCII to Unicode

History
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“English is no longer necessarily the lingua franca of the user. Perhaps there is no true lingua franca, but only the individual languages of the users.” (Brian King) Used since the beginning of computing, ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a 7-bit coded character set for information interchange in English (and Latin). It […]

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eBooks: 1971-2011 TOC

History
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After 12 years of research involving more than one hundred people, Marie Lebert has posted English translations of her work on 40 years of eBooks. To help you navigate through the series we’ve created this post to act as the Table of Contents for the articles. Each essays title is prefixed with the word “eBooks” […]

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In-depth Series on 40 Years of the eBook

News
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A couple of days ago Marie Lebert released her 40 Years of Project Gutenberg mini guide. Hundreds of people have already downloaded the guide and for those who are seeking a more in-depth review on the history of the ebook, then you’re in luck as Marie will be sharing more articles over the coming weeks. […]

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Considering the 40th Anniversary of eBooks

PG News
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How do I love ebooks, let me count the ways: 40 years ago there was only one eBook on the Internet that you could download, and the operators were resistant to an additional eBook being added more than once a year, and it had to be a short one, given the space and bandwidth. From […]

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40 Years of Project Gutenberg: A Mini Guide

News
Project Gutenberg: A Mini Guide

As today marks the 40th anniversary of Project Gutenberg we have a special ebook gift for all our volunteers and visitors. Marie Lebert and friends have put together a mini picture guide on the history of Project Gutenberg; from the founding of the project by Michael Hart, to the first native French ebook, the inauguration […]

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Project Gutenberg: Perfect eBooks Challenge

PG NewsVolunteers
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In an unprecedented move, Michael Hart, the inventor of eBooks, has announced he will buy lunch for anyone who can find errors, to the tune of one per chapter [10K of text] in the flagship of eBooks, The Alice in Wonderland Stories. This includes the two books that are often portrayed together: Alice’s Adventures in […]

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2011 is the Year of the eBook

News
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There are three times as many ereader devices now than just a single year ago, and Amazon has just announced that their own eBooks now have eight authors selling over a million eBooks. Of course, this is a million eBooks total, none of the eBooks are million sellers on their own, while sites such as […]

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4th Anniversary of Project Gutenberg Canada

PG News
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Today marks the fourth anniversary of the launch of Project Gutenberg Canada on July 1st 2007. We launched PG Canada to give Canadians full access to online versions of works in our public domain that are under copyright in other countries, notably the United States and the European Union. These countries have foolishly extended their […]

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World eBook Fair 2011

News
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Come join the celebration, “It’s the Year of the eBook!” We should be adding thousands of books, new and old, to the following libraries every single day for an entire month of July 4 to August 4, 2011 at our 6th annual World eBook Fair. All are welcome! We will have three eLibraries each with […]

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