Athena was founded in 1994 by Pierre Perroud, a Swiss teacher, and
hosted on the website of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Athena
was a multilingual digital library specializing in philosophy, science,
literature, history, and economics, either by digitizing documents or
by providing links to existing etexts. The Helvetia section provided
documents about Switzerland. Geneva being the main city in French-
speaking Switzerland, Athena also provided a section for French-
language texts. A specific page offered an extensive selection of other
digital libraries worldwide, with relevant links.
1994 > NAP: free digital versions as a marketing tool to sell print
books
NAP (National Academy Press, later renamed National Academies Press)
was the first publisher in 1994 to post the full text of some of its
books on its website, for free, with the authors' consent, and to use
the web as a marketing tool to sell print versions. NAP was created by
the National Academy of Sciences to publish its own reports and the
ones of the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine,
and the National Research Council. In 1994, NAP was publishing 200 new
books a year in science, engineering, and health. Oddly enough, there
was no drop in sales for books also available for free on the web. On
the contrary, sales increased. In 1998, the new NAP Reading Room
offered 1,000 free digital versions in various formats ("image", HTML,
PDF).