History of the ebook

Vannevar Bush describes the memex

Jul 1, 1945

a device in which an individual stores all his books, records and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with amazing speed and flexibility.%u201D He described a desk where the book can be projected on a transparent platen and can be paged through slowly or rapidly as necessary.

Andries van Dam creates hypertext editing system

Jan 1, 1967

Andries van Dam and a team from Brown University develops a method for text to be stored and retrieved on computers.

Michael Hart begins Project Gutenberg

Jul 4, 1971

Hart keyed in the Declaration of Independence as the first Project Gutenberg ASCII file.

Aldus Pagemaker 1.0 Desktop publisher released

Jul 1, 1985

First desktop publisher released for Macintosh.

First born digital ebook: Afternoon by Michael Joyce

Nov 13, 1987

Written using Storyspace software Afternoon: A story was one of the first hypertext ebooks to come under serious scrutiny. It was announced at the ACM Conference on Hypertext and was published on floppy disk.

Sony Discman released

Jul 1, 1990

Sony Discman played audio and data CDs in a proprietary ebook format.

Microsoft launches ebook effort.

Jul 2, 1991

Softbook launches Softbook Reader

Oct 1, 1998

NuvoMedia launches first hand held ebook reader: The Rocket

Oct 23, 1998

NetLibrary launched

Mar 29, 1999

NetLibrary provides library patrons who have internet browsers access to ebooks online.

Stephen King releases Riding the Bullet as ebook

Mar 1, 2000

Google Print Library Project Launched

Dec 14, 2004

Google announces a joint venture with major libraries to scan books. It it later renamed Google Book Search.

Amazon Kindle released

Nov 19, 2007

Google settles lawsuit with publishers

Oct 29, 2008

Google can show up to 20% of a text online for free and make the entire book available online for a fee. Books in the public domain are available in their entirety for free.