A Brief History Of EBooks

EBooks are most commonly used digital form of books in the current era. This article is going to be based upon the history of EBooks.

Definition Of E-Book

It is a digital file, containing a body of text and images suitable for distributing electronically and displaying on-screen in a manner similar to a printed book.

Who Invented The E-Book?

In 1971, Michael Hart launched Project Gutenberg and digitized the U.S. Declaration of Independence, becoming the first e-book in the world.

Evolution Of E-Books

Firstly,After the first e-book was created in 1971, In 1985, the Voyager Company, a pioneer in CD-ROMs was founded and published ”expanded books” on CD-ROM, including Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and in 1993, Digital Book Inc. offered the first 50 digital books on floppy disk. Fast forward to 1998, 4 important events happened- first dedicated e-book readers were launched-Rocket E-Book And Soft Book, first ISBN issued to an e-book was obtained, U.S. libraries began providing free e-books to the public through their websites and associated services, and Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. In 2000, Blue Ray discs were launched, Stephen King offered his novella Riding the Bullet as a digital-only computer-readable file and 2 years later, Random House and Harper Collins started to sell digital versions of their publications. In 2004, Sony released it’s Sony Librie e-reader. 2007 marked a change in the world of reading as Amazon introduced it’s Kindle ebook reader in U.S. In 2010, Apple introduced ipad with ibooks and it’s ibookstore on iTunes. Also, during the same year,Google launched it’s ebookstore.

Types And Formats Of Digital Publications

Firstly, electronic or digital books can come as printable PDFs, enhanced PDFs with hyperlinks and embedded files or ”true eBook” formats: EPUB or MOBI files. Secondly, the most common form is EPUB used by government agencies, commercial publishers and libraries.

ALSO READ: Power Of Social Media Marketing