Michael Hart, who founded Project Gutenberg in 1971, wrote: "We
consider eText to be a new medium, with no real relationship to paper,
other than presenting the same material, but I don't see how paper can
possibly compete once people each find their own comfortable way to
eTexts, especially in schools." (excerpt from a NEF interview, August
1998)
Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web in 1989-90, wrote: "The dream
behind the web is of a common information space in which we communicate
by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a
hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global,
be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream,
too, dependent on the web being so generally used that it became a
realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in
which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of
our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us
analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit
in, and how we can better work together." (excerpt from: The World Wide
Web: A Very Short Personal History, May 1998)
John Mark Ockerbloom, who created The Online Books Page in 1993, wrote:
"I've gotten very interested in the great potential the net had for
making literature available to a wide audience. (...) I am very excited
about the potential of the internet as a mass communication medium in
the coming years. I'd also like to stay involved, one way or another,
in making books available to a wide audience for free via the net,
whether I make this explicitly part of my professional career, or
whether I just do it as a spare-time volunteer." (excerpt from a NEF
interview, September 1998)
Here is the journey we are going to follow:
1968: ASCII is a 7-bit coded character set.
1971: Project Gutenberg is the first digital library.
1974: The internet takes off.
1977: UNIMARC is set up as a common bibliographic format.
1984: Copyleft is a new license for computer software.
1990: The web takes off.
1991: Unicode is a universal double-byte character set.
1993: The Online Books Page is a list of free eBooks.
1993: The PDF format is launched by Adobe.
1994: The first library website goes online.
1994: Publishers put some of their books online for free.
1995: Amazon.com is the first main online bookstore.
1995: The mainstream press goes online.
1996: The Palm Pilot is the first PDA.
1996: The Internet Archive is founded to archive the web.
1996: Teachers explore new ways of teaching.
1997: Online publishing begins spreading.
1997: The Logos Dictionary goes online for free.
1997: Multimedia convergence is the topic of an international
symposium.
1998: Library treasures like Beowulf go online.
1999: Librarians become webmasters.
1998: The web becomes multilingual.
1999: The Open eBook format is a standard for eBooks.
1999: Authors go digital.
2000: yourDictionary.com is a language portal.
2000: The Bible of Gutenberg goes online.
2000: Distributed Proofreaders digitizes books from public domain.
2000: The Public Library of Science (PLoS) works on free online
journals.
2001: Wikipedia is the first main online cooperative encyclopedia.
2001: Creative Commons works on new ways to respect authors' rights on
the web.
2003: MIT offers its course materials for free in its OpenCourseWare.
2004: Project Gutenberg Europe is launched as a multilingual project.
2004: Google launches Google Print to rename it Google Books.
2005: The Open Content Alliance (OCA) launches a world public digital
library.
2006: Microsoft launches Live Search Books as its own digital library.
2006: The union catalog WorldCat goes online for free.
2007: Citizendium is a main online "reliable" cooperative encyclopedia.
2007: The Encyclopedia of Life will document all species of animals and
plants.
[Unless specified otherwise, all quotations are excerpts from NEF
interviews. These interviews are available online at
<http://www.etudes-francaises.net>.]