In 1971 Michael Hart was handed a real boon--$100,000.00 worth of computer time with a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer. He decided that the greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries. The first "e-book" was born--a copy of the Declaration of Independence. Those humble beginnings would become Project Gutenberg. Today Project Gutenberg houses 20,000 free texts and over 100,000 books are available through their partners. Over 3,000,000 books are downloaded each month.
Early e-books were generally written in specialty areas, intended to be documents that only small groups might share, and therefore were few and far between.
Their subject matter ranged from technical manuals for cutting-edge hardware and manufacturing techniques to material "not suited for minors", and everywhere in-between.This fractured market of independents and specialty authors created a lack of consensus on the best way to package, sell, or read e-books.
Numerous e-book formats emerged and proliferated, some supported by major software companies, like Adobe's PDF format, and others supported by independent and open-source programmers. Multiple readers naturally followed multiple formats, most of them specializing in only one format, and thereby fragmenting the e-book market even more. The result was a lack of an overriding voice with the public regarding e-books, which kept e-books from becoming a mainstream product.
E-books continued to gain in their own underground markets. Many e-book publishers began distributing books that were in the public domain, or that were simply old and hard-to-find. At the same time, authors with books that were not accepted by their publisher began to strike out on their own, offering the books online so they could be seen by others. Unofficial, and occasionally unauthorized, catalogs of books became available over the web, and sites devoted to e-books began spreading the word to the public.
One of the first genres to become successful in the e-book field was that of the romance story. Romance novels were perfect for e-books, the genre already considered a "guilty pleasure" by most of the public, due to its oft-ridiculed and notoriously salacious content. E-book romances were easy to shop for and buy from the privacy of your home, and just as easy to read without revealing your guilty pleasure to others. Unbeknownst to the rest of the world, romance e-books had become a quiet success.
With all of this activity by major publishers and electronics companies alongside independents, new selling models are being developed, formats are beginning to homogenize, dedicated reading hardware is now available, and e-books are achieving global distribution. E-books have spawned new e-publishing houses, electronics manufacturers are releasing more e-book readers designed for the masses, and software designers are creating new reader applications for portable electronics gear like handheld computers, smartphones and game consoles. Sony has recently introduced a popular portable reader, and Amazon.com has begun selling its Kindle model.
The public, largely ignorant of e-books in the twentieth century, now see fellow commuters reading e-books on laptops around campus, on handheld computers at the coffee shop and on cellphones during their commute. In Japan, sales of mobile-phone novels—-books that you download and read, usually in instalments, on the screen of your cell phone—-have jumped from nothing five years ago to over ¥10 billion ($82m) a year today (The Economist)
Consumers can now find more of the kind of literature they want to read, from best-sellers by established authors, to cutting-edge material by daring new authors, and everything in-between.
