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Originally Posted by barryem

I may have exaggerated a bit. I began reading ebooks on an HP95LX. I bought it in the year it was released in 1991, not long after it's release date. Someone wrote an app for reading books scanned to text called the Vertical Reader, probably in it's first year. So I probably began in 1991, maybe early 1992.

My first memories of reading ebooks were text format on a CP/M system which also ran a BBS system (originally using CBBS).

Originally Posted by barryem

That said, if I had known about them I could have read them earlier. Michael Hart is thought to have originated ebooks in 1971 and founded Gutenberg in that same year. I wasn't aware of this till after I bought my HP95lx but if I had been I'd probably have been reading earlier.

I remember some ebooks from Project Gutenberg being published using file distribution through BBS systems in the late 70's/early 80's.

Originally Posted by barryem

Ebooks didn't become common until the Palm Pilot, sometime in 1992 or later. I got my first Palm about 1993 and by then they were all over the place on Palm sites. It was still a few years later before you could actually buy ebooks. I'm not allowed to talk about this much in here but commercial ebooks came into being when there were already a lot of people reading ebooks, mostly on Palms.

I remember reading on a Palm starting around the 1995 time frame though I had read plain text files on CP/M, DOS and OS/2 systems. I tend to agree that the ebooks available then might not have been "legitimate" but there was no other choice at the time. For the most part, you either scanned and converted your own books or you downloaded what others had scanned and converted. I would likely have done more downloading other people's work but I found that the quality level of the few I looked at weren't up to my not very demanding standards--at least, I think of them as not being very demanding. At the time, I did not consider scanning and converting my books for my personal use as being piracy and looking back, I still don't consider those actions as piracy since I owned the book and was format shifting it for my personal use. If that defence is good enough to audio recordings, it should be good enough for books.

The only commercial ebook I remember purchasing in the early 1990's was from one author who made some of his books available in electronic format as plain text files with a shareware pricing scheme. Most of the commercial ebooks available in the early and middle of that decade were simply of no interest to me.

From what I remember, the commercial ebook market really started--for me--in 1999 and I started buying books in electronic form. My wife remembers Romance.net(?) a few years earlier in 1996 though she made relatively few purchases until she borrowed an ereader from me. Most of my early purchases were from Baen's Webscription service since they were publishing books I wanted to read. Oddly, I still find Baen as among my favourite ebooks sources. What can I say? Jim Baen's stance on DRM, the Free Library, the books on CD bound into their hardcovers. The Free Library alone resulted in my purchasing quite a few other books either to finish a series I started there or from finding an author whose work I liked.

Originally Posted by barryem

I think a small point of protest is needed here. I'm all for keeping this site honest but being unable to talk about the real history of ebooks doesn't really seem like a good way of doing it.

I would agree that discussing the real history of ebooks should be permitted. As one of those who was there, it took a lot more work and time to convert an DTB to electronic format that it took me to earn the money to purchase an ebook--if it had been available.