Short answers, pulled from the story.
There is no single agreed inventor of the ebook. Roberto Busa began the Index Thomisticus in 1946, Ángela Ruiz Robles patented her Mechanical Encyclopedia in 1949, Andries van Dam coined the term "electronic book" at Brown University in the 1960s, and Michael S. Hart created the first freely available electronic document in 1971 when he typed the US Declaration of Independence into a computer and launched Project Gutenberg.
Amazon released the Kindle e-reader in November 2007 with a six-inch E Ink screen. The Kindle Store opened simultaneously with more than 88,000 e-books available, and the device sold out in five and a half hours.
By 2021-30% of US adults had read an ebook in the past year, up from 17% in 2011.
Publishers charge libraries at least three times the consumer price for ebook licenses because a single digital file could theoretically be checked out by a large number of users. Libraries also receive a limited license rather than ownership, meaning the title expires after a set number of loans or a set period of time.
The US Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit in 2012 alleging Apple conspired with five major publishers to raise ebook prices on Amazon. In July 2013, Judge Denise Cote found Apple guilty, and in March 2016 the Supreme Court declined Apple's final appeal, obliging Apple to pay 450 million dollars.
EPUB is an open ebook format released in 2007 by the International Digital Publishing Forum to replace the Open eBook format. Open eBook was built in the late 1990s by a consortium that included scholars from Brown University's Text Encoding Initiative; it required subsets of XHTML and CSS and an XML schema for organizing a book's components.