[Summary]
Founded in 1993 by John Mark Ockerbloom when he was a student at
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), the Online
Books Page is "a website that facilitates access to books that are
freely readable over the internet." John Mark Ockerbloom first
maintained this page on the website of the School of Computer Science
of Carnegie Mellon University. In 1999, he moved it at the University
of Pennsylvania Library, after being hired as a digital library planner
and researcher. The Online Books Page offered links to 12,000 books in
1999, 20,000 books in 2003 (including 4,000 books published by women),
25,000 books in 2006, 30,000 books in 2008 (including 7,000 books from
Project Gutenberg) and 35,000 books in 2010.
***
In 1993, John Mark Ockerbloom created The Online Books Page as “a
website that facilitates access to books that are freely readable over
the internet.”
The web was still in its infancy, with Mosaic as its first browser.
John Mark Ockerbloom was a graduate student at the School of Computer
Science (CS) of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU, Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania).
Five years later, in September 1998, John Mark wrote: "I was the
original webmaster here at CMU CS, and started our local web in 1993.
The local web included pages pointing to various locally developed
resources, and originally The Online Books Page was just one of these
pages, containing pointers to some books put online by some of the
people in our department. (Robert Stockton had made web versions of
some of Project Gutenberg's texts.) After a while, people started
asking about books at other sites, and I noticed that a number of sites
(not just Gutenberg, but also Wiretap and some other places) had books
online, and that it would be useful to have some listing of all of
them, so that you could go to one place to download or view books from
all over the net. So that's how my index got started.
I eventually gave up the webmaster job in 1996, but kept The Online
Books Page, since by then I'd gotten very interested in the great
potential the net had for making literature available to a wide
audience. At this point there are so many books going online that I
have a hard time keeping up. But I hope to keep up my online books
works in some form or another. 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."
In 1998, there was an index of 7,000 books that could be browsed by
author, title or subject. There were also pointers to significant
directories and archives of online texts, and to special exhibits.
As stated on the website at the time: "Along with books, The Online
Books Page is also now listing major archives of serials (such as
magazines, published journals, and newspapers) (...). Serials can be at
least as important as books in library research. Serials are often the
first places that new research and scholarship appear. They are sources
for firsthand accounts of contemporary events and commentary. They are
also often the first (and sometimes the only) place that quality
literature appears. (For those who might still quibble about serials
being listed on a 'books page', back issues of serials are often bound
and reissued as hardbound 'books'.)"
In 1999, after graduating from Carnegie Mellon with a Ph.D. in computer
science, John Mark was hired as a digital library planner and
researcher at the University of Pennsylvania Library. He also moved The
Online Books Page there, kept it as clear and simple, and went on
expanding it.
The Online Books Page offered links to 12,000 books in 1999, 20,000
books in 2003 (including 4,000 books published by women), 25,000 books
in 2006, 30,000 books in 2008 (including 7,000 books from Project
Gutenberg) and 35,000 books in 2010. The books "have been authored,
placed online, and hosted by a wide variety of individuals and groups
throughout the world". The FAQ listed copyright information about most
countries in the world, with links to further reading.