Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
However I think it just might be true that pirates invented ebooks. My first exposure to them was about 1991 or '92, in the days before the internet was even available to the public. In those days Compuserve and private BBS systems were what people used. I was active in the HP forum because I had an HP95lx, a pocket size MS-Dos PC.
A few of us in the forum who had access to scanners and OCR software scanned a few of our favorite books, OCR'd them into plain text and shared them with each other. We did this openly and freely with no thought that anyone might care. Compuserve had strictly enforced policies against piracy and they didn't care. The HP forum's polices were even stricter and they provided storage for us to share these files. We were honest people sharing with our friends.
I have no way of knowing that these were the first ebooks. I doubt they were. Very likely other groups were doing the same thing. But I am pretty sure this is how ebooks got started.
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Definitely not the first. Project Gutenberg has of course been around since the 1970s and had created thousands of ebooks by the 1990s. I was reading PG eBooks on hand-held devices in the mid '80s. That's the way I first read literally hundreds of classics.