Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
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.
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On the other hand, while I was wrong and you were right, I'm not sure this has much to do with the point I was making. PG only dealt with out-of-copyright books and we were sharing whatever books we were reading at the time. When the Palm came along and first started popularizing ebooks that wasn't about what PG was doing. It was about sharing currently popular books and to a large extent that's what ebooks are still about. So while Michael Hart probably did invent ebooks the ebook world today still probably grew out of the work of the pirates. That still makes the publishers seem just a little bit like claim jumpers.
Barry