Ebook

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1971, a man named Michael S. Hart sat down at a Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the University of Illinois and typed out the United States Declaration of Independence. He was not making a copy for filing. He was making history. Hart's goal was simple: turn text into something a computer could hold and share. What he started that day became Project Gutenberg, the first large-scale effort to put books into electronic form freely available to anyone on the Internet.

  The ebook has since traveled a long road from that mainframe to the pocket-sized devices carried by hundreds of millions of people. But the story of the ebook is not a clean line from invention to triumph. It is a story of competing inventors, fragmented formats, legal battles over prices, and a quiet, ongoing war between the smell of paper and the glow of a screen. Who actually invented the ebook? Why did it take decades to reach ordinary readers? And what happens to a book you buy but do not quite own?

• 2. Before the Screen

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  Bob Brown wrote something in 1930 that he called The Readies, a title that played off the word "talkies" after he watched his first sound film. Brown described a simple reading machine that a person could carry, plug into any electric light socket, and use to read a hundred-thousand-word novel in ten minutes. Brown's vision was as much about reinventing language as inventing a device. He wanted portmanteau symbols to replace normal words and punctuation that could simulate movement. Later e-readers followed none of that.

  What Brown did get right was the miniaturization and portability of the devices that would eventually arrive. A writer named Jennifer Schuessler noted that Brown believed his machine would let readers adjust type size, avoid paper cuts, and save trees, and that one day words could be recorded directly on what he called "the palpitating ether."

  In 1949, Ángela Ruiz Robles, a teacher from Ferrol, Spain, patented a device she called the Enciclopedia Mecánica, or Mechanical Encyclopedia. It ran on compressed air. Text and graphics were loaded onto spools that users would place onto rotating spindles. Ruiz Robles designed it to cut the number of books her pupils had to carry to school. The final version was planned to include audio recordings, a magnifying glass, a calculator, and a light for reading at night. It was never produced commercially, but a prototype survives today at the National Museum of Science and Technology in A Coruña.

• 3. Competing Inventors

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  Roberto Busa, a Jesuit scholar, began work in 1946 on what may be the first e-book: the Index Thomisticus, a heavily annotated electronic index to the writings of Thomas Aquinas. He completed it in the 1970s. A distributable CD-ROM version appeared in 1989, and the full work was published online in 2005. Some historians set it aside because the Index was a research tool for linguistic analysis rather than a published reading edition in its own right.

  At roughly the same time in the early 1960s, Douglas Engelbart led the NLS project at Stanford Research Institute, and Andries van Dam ran the Hypertext Editing System and later FRESS projects at Brown University. FRESS documents ran on IBM mainframes and were built to adapt dynamically for different users, display hardware, and window sizes. They included automated tables of contents, indexes, and extensive hyperlinking. Van Dam is generally credited with coining the term "electronic book," a phrase established enough to appear in an article title by 1985.

  FRESS was used for reading primary texts and for annotation and discussion in courses including English Poetry and Biochemistry. The philosopher Roderick Chisholm used it to produce several of his books. In the preface to his 1979 work Person and Object, Chisholm wrote: "The book would not have been completed without the epoch-making File Retrieval and Editing System."

  Brown University's electronic book work extended well beyond FRESS. It included US Navy-funded projects for electronic repair manuals, a large-scale distributed hypermedia system called InterMedia, a spinoff company named Electronic Book Technologies that built DynaText (the first SGML-based e-reader system), and significant contributions to what became the Open eBook standard.

• 4. Formats and Fragmentation

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  Adobe introduced the PDF format in 1993, giving e-books one of their earliest widely adopted containers. Unlike most formats, PDFs locked content to a fixed dimension and layout rather than reflowing dynamically to fit a screen. That rigidity would become a defining frustration of early e-book reading.

  Different e-reader devices accepted only one or a few formats, splintering the market. Publishers and independent authors lacked any shared standard for packaging and selling e-books. Scholars working through the Text Encoding Initiative developed guidelines for encoding books for scholarly use, and several of those scholars including Allen Renear, Elli Mylonas, and Steven DeRose of Brown University helped build the Open eBook format in the late 1990s. Open eBook required subsets of XHTML and CSS, a set of multimedia formats, and an XML schema to list a book's components, cover art, and table of contents. That architecture eventually led to EPUB, the open format that Google Books later used to convert large numbers of public domain works.

  In 1999, publisher Simon and Schuster created an imprint called iBooks and became the first major trade publisher to release some titles simultaneously in print and e-book form. That same year, Tor Books predecessor Baen Books opened its Baen Free Library, making titles available at no cost. The first major publisher to drop digital rights management entirely was Tor Books, one of the largest science fiction and fantasy publishers, in 2012.

• 5. Hardware Takes Shape

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  In 1980, the United States Department of Defense began developing a portable electronic device for technical maintenance information called Project PEAM, the Portable Electronic Aid for Maintenance. Detailed specifications were finished in fiscal years 1981 and 1982. Texas Instruments began building prototypes that same year. Four prototypes were delivered for testing in 1986, tests finished in 1987, and a patent application for the device was submitted by Texas Instruments on the 4th of December, 1985, listing John K. Harkins and Stephen H. Morriss as inventors.

  In 1992, Sony launched the Data Discman, a reader that played e-books stored on CDs. By 1993, Paul Baim released a freeware HyperCard stack called EBook that let any user convert a text file into a pageable electronic book. A notable feature was automatic tracking of the last page read. The name of that stack may have helped popularize the word "ebook" itself.

  Nuvo Media released the first handheld e-reader, the Rocket eBook, in 1998. That same year SoftBook launched a reader that could store up to 100,000 pages of content including text, graphics, and pictures.

  The e-ink display changed everything. E Ink Corporation was co-founded in 1997 by MIT undergraduates J.D. Albert, Barrett Comiskey, MIT professor Joseph Jacobson, Jeremy Rubin, and Russ Wilcox. The first e-reader to use that technology was the Sony Librie, released in 2004 with a six-inch screen. In November 2007, Amazon released the Kindle with a six-inch E Ink screen and the Kindle Store opened simultaneously with more than 88,000 e-books available. The Kindle sold out in five and a half hours. By July 2010, Amazon reported it was selling 140 e-books for every 100 hardcover books sold.

• 6. Libraries and Lending

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  U.S. libraries began offering free e-books to the public in 1998, though those early collections were primarily scholarly and could not be downloaded. In 2003, libraries started lending popular fiction and non-fiction e-books as downloadable files, a shift that worked far better for general readers. From 2005 to 2008, library e-book collections grew by 60%.

  A 2010 Public Library Funding and Technology Access Study by the American Library Association found that 66% of public libraries in the United States were offering e-books. That year the industry acknowledged what it called a "tipping point" when e-book technology would become widely established. The U.S. National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central repository now provides archiving and access to over 4.1 million articles in a standard XML format known as the Journal Article Tag Suite.

  For libraries, the economics of e-book lending cut differently than for individual buyers. Publishers sold licenses rather than books, meaning a library did not own what it purchased. Those licenses expired after a set number of loans or a set time period. The cost of an e-book license to a library was at least three times what an individual consumer would pay. Publishers justified the premium on the grounds that a single digital file could theoretically be checked out by a vast number of users, though some research found the opposite effect: wider access sometimes increased rather than reduced sales.

  A 2018 survey found that 92% of libraries held e-books in their collections, and that 27% had negotiated interlibrary loan rights for at least some of those titles. In 2018 alone, U.S. public libraries reported more than 274 million e-books loaned to cardholders through OverDrive, a 22% increase over the 2017 figure.

• 7. Legal Battles and Market Swings

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  In 2005, Google announced plans to digitize the holdings of several major libraries as part of what became the Google Books Library Project, and was promptly sued by the Authors Guild for scanning books still under copyright. Years of litigation followed. In November 2013, US District Judge Chin sided with Google, citing fair use. The Authors Guild appealed. In October 2015, the US appeals court upheld that ruling. The Supreme Court declined to hear the Authors Guild's appeal in April 2016, leaving Google free to scan library books and display snippets in search results.

  A parallel legal fight unfolded over pricing. The US Department of Justice in March 2012 prepared an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and five major publishers including Simon and Schuster, Hachette, Penguin, Macmillan, and HarperCollins, alleging they had colluded to raise prices on Amazon. In July 2013, US District Court Judge Denise Cote found Apple guilty. Five major publishers, as part of a settlement, were ordered to refund about three dollars for every electronic copy of a New York Times bestseller sold between April 2010 and May 2012, a total that could reach 160 million dollars. Apple appealed. In June 2015, the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the ruling with a 2-to-1 vote. The Supreme Court declined Apple's final appeal in March 2016, obliging Apple to pay 450 million dollars.

  Despite these pressures, the market shifted again. By the end of 2016, smartphones and tablets had each individually overtaken dedicated e-readers as the primary method for reading e-books. The Association of American Publishers reported that the US adult e-book market declined 16.9% in the first nine months of 2016 compared to the same period in 2015. Part of that decline traced to average e-book prices rising from six dollars to nearly ten dollars as major publishers increased prices. According to the Association of American Publishers 2019 annual report, publishers made 22.6 billion dollars in print and 2.04 billion in e-books.

• 8. What You Actually Own

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  In December 2014, Kobo released reading data gathered from over 21 million of its users worldwide. Only 44.4% of UK readers finished the bestselling e-book The Goldfinch. The top-selling e-book in the UK that year, One Cold Night, was completed by 69% of its readers. Kobo also found that 60% of e-books purchased from its store were never opened at all, and that the more expensive the book, the more likely a reader was to open it.

  Amazon tracks which books its users are reading, what page they are on, how long they spend on each page, and which passages they highlight. Amazon reports that 85% of its e-book readers look up a word while reading.

  The question of ownership sits at the center of the e-book's most uncomfortable tensions. A paper book can be lent, resold, left on a shelf, or inherited. An e-book tied to digital rights management can be revoked if a provider's business fails, if a copyright dispute arises, or if a credit card expires. Most major publishers, including Amazon, Google, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Apple, sell DRM-protected titles. The first major publisher to remove DRM was Tor Books in 2012. Smaller publishers like O'Reilly Media and Baen Books had already done so before that.

  A 2017 environmental study found that substituting more than 4.7 print books per year with e-books produced fewer greenhouse gas emissions even when accounting for the manufacturing of the e-reader device itself. Project Gutenberg holds over 52,000 freely available public domain e-books. The Internet Archive and Open Library together offer more than six million. All books published before 1928 are in the public domain in the United States, which is why those titles can be hosted and downloaded freely. By the end of 2015, Google Books had scanned more than 25 million books, and over 70 million e-readers had been shipped worldwide.