Ebooks before Amazon

[Little.Egret]

Copied from an Amazon Forum, I think it's accurate

CBRetriever says:
(KINDLE FORUM PRO)
2007 the early days? Not quite.

1971 - Project Gutenberg was launched to create electronic copies of books.
1985-1992 Robert Stein starts Voyager Company Expanded Books and books on CD-ROM.
1992 - The DD8 Data DiscmanSony launches the Data Discman electronic book reader.
1992-1993 - Crugnola and Rigamonti design and create the first e-book reader, called Incipit, as a thesis project at the Politecnico di Milano.
1994 - C & M Online is founded in Raleigh, North Carolina and publishes e-books through its imprint, Boson Books.
1997 - E-Ink Corporation is founded
1998 - The Cybook / Cybook Gen1 was sold and manufactured at first by Cytale (1998-2003) then by Bookeen and Websites began selling ebooks in English, such as eReader.com and eReads.com
1999 - Baen began selling ebooks
2002-2003 (LE bought Lois Bujold ebooks from Fictionwise)
2002 - Random House and HarperCollins begin selling ebooks
2004 - Sony introduces first e-ink reader and Google starts to digitise books
2005 - Amazon buys Mobipocket (French company)
==

[QuantumIguana]

Until I tried the Kindle, I didn't think much of e-books. I too had an Amiga with a CD full of public domain books. It was cool to have all those books on something as small as a CD (or course, now I can have 100 times more on an object the size of my thumbnail!) but I didn't care much for the experience of reading on a computer screen. I didn't think I would like e-books until I tried the Kindle, but I probably would have been just as impressed with some other e-reader. I'll read on a computer in a pinch, though.

[daffy4u]

Peanut Press for my Handspring Visors and later Palm devices (late 90's).

[Jessica Lares]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

Things to look up in addition to the Project Gutenberg stuff:

- Living Books (animated kid's story books on CD-ROMs)

Oh yeah, those were great. They've actually just re-released them under a different brand (although they're just ports of the old ones). The website was one of the first that I ever saw use the new Macromedia Flash technology.

Mine are still sitting here in the drawer across from where I'm sitting. The school where my dad works used to buy them for the classroom and I'd borrow them, but he bought a few for me too. The nice thing was that when you bought them from Random House themselves, they'd have the actual book included aswell.

The original series was great, but the newer ones were more interactive. Could sit there for hours with just one book either way.

I guess if you count those as eBooks, then I've been reading them since 1994, and I was only five then. Haha.

Realistically, the first portable device I used as a reader was a Hewlett-Packard iPAQ my dad bought me in 2005. Mostly just text files.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by owly

What where the big ebook sources before Amazon, was mobi the main file format?

The books I read on my Palm IIIxe were from Project Gutenberg. They were downloaded as .txt and converted to the Palm doc format with a PC freeware program.

Every morning, I downloaded the packaged highlights of several newspapers from advertising-supported avantgo.com.

I also converted essays, found on the web, that were too long to conveniently read on my PC. Now I do it with Send to Kindle for Chrome.

If the same title was available from our public library, I read the paper book.

Broadsheet newspapers are too big. PDA's are too small. A six inch reader is just right

[RHWright]

I had a Palm, so I was mainly looking for pdb format. So, Gutenberg, manybooks.net, ereader.com. There was one other site I can't for the life of me remember that had a good amount of PD stuff in various formats where I picked up several of the old Shadow novels.

[shanghaichica]

I first read ebooks on the iPhone circa 2008 before getting my first reader in 2010.

I read PDFs on PDA phones before that but the iPhone was the first time I read whole books in ebook format.

[simplyparticular]

1996 - read text files from PG on my Macintosh Performa 6116CD. It saved me a reasonable amount of cash in my college lit classes, made it easier to quote sources for coursework and gave me useful skills for when I needed to research primary and secondary sources.

1998 I was converting PG public domain.txt to Newton MessagePad format. I worked for a publisher at that time, and then I ran a bookstore, so I was still heavily in to paper books, but appreciated reading hard-to-find classics on the Newton, even if it was a clunky chunk of plastic and glass.

2001 - bought Palm IIIxe, and downloading a free eBook from Peanut Press was one of the first things I did. PP became Peanut Reader, then Palm Reader, then eReader.com, then Fictionwise. I went through that whole transition with them. I owned Palm OS devices by just about every manufacturer who licensed the OS, but I read the most on the Sony Clié models, as they had the best screens and that jog wheel was ergonomically awesome for reading. I converted and read .pdb formats (using iSiloX, AvantGo and I swear there was another converter program), plus the occasional purchase from MobiPocket.

Circa 2009 - my Palm Treo breathed its last, and I bought a used original iPhone. All of my Palm book files made the journey via Stanza and eReader apps. But this transition was short-lived.

April 2010 - the agency publisher collusion decimated eReader/Fictionwise and all the other stores that had supported PDAs. So I left the BPH behind and worked on my TBR, the MobileRead library and borrowing eBooks from libraries. I spent about 2 years trying out various eInk devices, but never stuck long with any as either the device or store was lacking, and I was still boycotting agency.

2012 - nearly all my early Peanut Press purchases made the transition when B&N shut down eReader/Fictionwise, so I've come full circle.

I still miss the sophistication of library organization in the old Palm apps. All of that functionality was left behind. I still can't understand what happened to that programming - the eInk and touchscreen smartphone device makers all started from scratch, rather than looking at the successes in previous technology. I'm sure patents played a role, but since all those old companies eventually got gobbled up by Amazon and B&N, that's no excuse.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The first Palm device I used as a reader was the Palm III

Me too. I went from that to a Handspring Visor, which I just sold on eBay not too long ago.

My wife read books from Peanut Press on her Palm device for a while, but I never found an electronic screen that I could have enjoyed reading a whole book on until we got our first Kindle.

I probably still have CDROMs of "World Greatest Books" and the like in a closet, but I could never read more than brief passages at a time on my green phosphor computer screen or my Palm device.

Other than that, my e-reading was limited to short stories and various text files and the like downloaded from BBSes and Archie servers.

ApK

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

The University of Virginia partnered with Microsoft to produce very high quality digital editions for free. Around that time came the now legendary BLACK MASK collection you could d/l for free or buy on CD in the format of your choice; LIT, MOBI, PDF, HTML, or ROCKETREADER. I got all, of course. Repeatedly.

If they were downloadable for free back then, would you be inclined to put them onto a DVD and ship them to me? I'd be willing to compensate for the DVD, shipping and packaging of course.

[Glorfindel]

^You don't want to download them?

[Katsunami]

I would, but those books are over 10 years old. Do you have a complete source?

[fjtorres]

Last I looked the collection ran around 30000 titles for download... one by one...
There's a reason I happily popped for ten bucks for each version of the set.

[owly]

I remember reading something about that the first dedicated reader was made in the 80's. You could only see one row of text at a time and the only book on it was the bible. Ring any bells?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by owly

I remember reading something about that the first dedicated reader was made in the 80's. You could only see one row of text at a time and the only book on it was the bible. Ring any bells?

The first dedicated one I'm aware of was the Sony Data Diskman, which was released in Japan in July 1990. It displayed books on CDs and, when released, had only 20 titles available - all reference works.