Download Microsoft Word version (APA 7 format)

A short history of digital books and digital readers

Introduction

Ever since the advent of the Gutenberg printing press in the 15th century, books have served as an ideal container for text documents, a physical product that validated and showcased the textual output of individual or multiple authors. To have one’s own words committed to print documents and reproduced for many readers was usually considered an achievement for the authors, but to write a book and have it published was seen, and is still seen, as a claim to authoritative knowledge. A book is a substantial collection of knowledge within numerous pages, bound within a jacket and printed as a hard copy of text with costs for the printing materials, the press machines and the labour required.

Once a book is printed and distributed, it may only reach a few readers if the print run is small or it may reach millions. For example, from 1964-1967, 720 million copies of The Quotations of Mao Tse Tsung were printed, which  “probably still holds the world record for most copies printed of a single work in under four years (Norman, 2023).” Although many books have been transformative in their power to influence readers, some of the limitations have been obvious from the beginning—the cost of printing, the value and timeliness of the information within them, the ability to distribute and promote the books through a supply chain, and even the accessibility of printed books. Even if publishers recoup the cost of printing by selling books to readers willing to pay the price, how will they know that the books are accessible to people who cannot read the language they are written in, are not literate enough to comprehend them, or are unable to read them because of physical disabilities such as blindness?

The Digital Age of the late 20th century and early 21st century has created  opportunities for people to extend and bend the communication mode by rendering text into a digital format and even distributing digital books online through networks. Although the first digital book or “eBook” was created in 1971 for the launch of Project Gutenberg (Government Book Talk, 2014), this essay will highlight developments in communication needs, inventions and practices for digital books from the early 1990s to today.

The “digital library” as a metaphor for the World Wide Web

Whenever a new media emerges, people often contextualize it by comparing it to an earlier, more familiar media form and then use that previous form as a metaphor for the emerging media. As a result, the first iterations of an emerging media are comparable in many ways to more familiar forms, but eventually our experiments with the new media and variations on how it can be used extend our understanding of it into a new paradigm. For example, early television dramas were considered similar to stage plays or radio dramas. Many TV dramas were actually adapted from radio shows (Encyclopædia Britannica, inc., n.d.) and structured in a similar format to radio dramas and stage plays.

When the World Wide Web became popular in the 1990s with increased Internet access and free downloads of the first graphical web browsers, many early adopters grasped for how to describe the Web experience. A popular metaphor for the Web was to describe as a kind of library of books with many pages that could be accessed with a computer and a modem.  That metaphor, however was clearly stretched beyond its tensile strength and even in the mid-1990s, people were pointing out clear distinctions between the Web and a conventionally-operated public library (Kibbee, 1996).

The emergence of digital book file formats

One of the challenges for early digital books and documents was to convert them in a format that could be universally readable, online or offline, and would also maintain the integrity of the book’s visual design, layout and font styles. In 1991,  Adobe co-founder Dr. John Warnock launched a project to create a digital format that would meet those requirements and in 1992 Adobe launched the Portable Document Format or PDF as it became known by its file extension. The purpose of the PDF format was to “to enable anyone to capture documents from any application, send electronic versions of these documents anywhere, and view and print them on any machine (Adobe.com, n.d.).”

In order for people to create a platform agnostic PDF document, Adobe had to develop Adobe Acrobat publishing software in 1993. Then, to make it accessible to people who did not have the Acrobat software, they also developed and distributed a free app called Adobe Acrobat Reader. While it seems as though this might have been an ideal publishing solution for eBooks, the PDF format did not dominate the 1990s, perhaps because eBooks in that format would be in a fixed layout instead of  the more fluid layout that we associate with eBooks today. In the 1990s, several new eBook formats appeared that were proprietary file types associated with handheld devices such as the Microsoft ClearType format for Microsoft Readers, the PalmDoc format for Palm Pilots and the Rocket eBook format.

In 1999, The Open eBook Forum was formed “to develop an open standard format that all e-books could use,” which became the OEB/OEBPS format. Eventually, the .EPUB format emerged out of this research as a standardized, open source and widely distributed file type for eBooks and eBook reading devices (Kasdorf, 2022)

Creating a user experience for eBooks

By 2007, there was the PDF, a reliable and popular fixed format for eBooks, numerous proprietary file formats that could only be read on their related devices, and the .EPUB format which was open source but still quite new and therefore not widely distributed or even readable on many devices. There was an appetite for eBooks and eBook devices that still had not been fully satisfied in the market. It appeared that there was a disconnect between authors, publishers, eReader hardware and eBook software. That same year, Amazon.com, which was established as a leading online marketplace for print books and other merchandise, launched the Amazon Kindle reader, which used its own proprietary file format, MOBI, and eventually allowed EPUB files to be readable as well.

Now there was a powerful supply chain that could convert works from authors and their publishers into an eBook format that was built into an eBook reader that could also connect to the Amazon.com store to download seemingly endless books. Of course, eReader devices with proprietary file formats had been around since the 1990s, but the Amazon Kindle device improved on all of them by becoming “an extension of the Amazon store” which had about 88,000 titles available when the Kindle was launched. It had an enhanced user experience with “E Ink, a breakthrough technology of several years ago that mimes the clarity of a printed book” (Levy, 2007) more than 30 hours of reading on one charge, and could connect to the Internet if a reader wanted to look up some information.

The device also allowed readers other user experience basics such as the ability to change the font size, bookmark pages, highlight text, and search inside an eBook (Levy, 2007). In its essence, the Amazon Kindle had become an early tablet device that inspired other imitators such as the Kobo reader, but its specialized use as an eBook reader limited its application as a more universal tablet device and, furthermore, it could not be connected to a cellphone data network to be fully mobile.

Tablets, smartphones and cloud-based apps

The same year, the release of the first iPhone eclipsed not only the popular Blackberry devices but also provided a fully mobile smartphone that could hold a large number of mobile apps  while enabling cellular phone service over any network. The first iPhone generations, however, lacked any eReader software until the iBook app became available in 2010, which was also the year the first iPad tablet was released. Now smartphones and tablets could compete in the marketplace with more specialized handhelds such as the Kindle.

Smartphones and tablets were quickly becoming the universal mobile networking devices while eReaders such as the Kindle and Kobo began to seem redundant. This illustrates how the market not only wanted a more universal eBook format that could be accessible to all but also a universal handheld mobile device that could download eBooks, read them and store them either on the device or in the cloud. In 2010, Amazon released a free Kindle Reader app for Android that can now be downloaded on any mobile Android, iOS, Blackberry, Windows and other operating systems.  New versions of Amazon’s Kindle have continued to be released up to 2022 for those who still want a device to use exclusively for reading eBooks (Hall, 2023)

The impact of eBooks on literacy and education

By the early 2000s there was a growing interest among educators in Open Education (OE) and Open Education Resources (OER), most notably the launch of the OpenCourseWare (OCW) initiative by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to provide learners everywhere with “a free and open collection of material from thousands of MIT courses, covering the entire MIT curriculum” (MITOpenCourseWare, 2023).

Educators not only saw the value in making learning resources more accessible and inexpensive for local and international students but also began to realize the potential for academic eBooks and other OER (in other formats such as HTML pages) to be used in distance education and international education “to improve the interaction between educators and distance learning students in terms of access to teaching and learning materials and submission of assignments (Shiratuddin et al, 2006).

Nevertheless, the free market research and development of eBook formats and eReaders over the last 20 years has helped digital books become acceptable in academia and studies show that in their various forms, eBooks even had a positive impact on literacy.  A 2021 study even found that “Children living in a deprived context, at risk of learning disabilities, and English Language Learners benefited from all the reviewed e-book interventions, which highly improved their literacy skills, regarding concepts about print, phonological awareness, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. (López-Escribano et al, 2021).

In 2023, we are already witnessing how providing eBooks for education can result in learning resources being offered in a more accessible format for a greater number of diverse students in more learning environments than ever before in history.

References

Adobe. (2023). What is a PDF? portable document format. Everything you need to know about the PDF. https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/about-adobe-pdf.html

Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. (n.d.). Television in the United States: Early genres. Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/art/television-in-the-United-States/Early-genres

Hall, C. (2023, March 27). Amazon Kindle: A brief history from the original Kindle onwards. Pocket. https://www.pocket-lint.com/amazon-kindle-history-kindle-to-the-kindle-oasis/

Levy, S. (2007, November 17). Amazon: Reinventing the book. Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/amazon-reinventing-book-96909

López-Escribano, C., Valverde-Montesino, S., & García-Ortega, V. (2021). The Impact of E-Book Reading on Young Children’s Emergent Literacy Skills: An Analytical Review. International journal of environmental research and public health, 18(12), 6510. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18126510

MIT OpenCourseWare. (2023). About us: MIT OpenCourseWare: Free Online Course Materials. MIT OpenCourseWare. https://ocw.mit.edu/about/

Norman, J. (2023). 720 million copies quotations of chairman Mao are printed and distributed in under four years. 720 Million Copies Quotations of Chairman Mao Are Printed and Distributed in Under Four Years : History of Information. https://historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=823

Postman, N. (2011). Technopoly: The surrender of culture to technology. Knopf Doubleday Publishing. (Original work published 1992)