Rooms filled with publishing equipment may soon be obsolete.
The digital publishing revolution may, in retrospect, be as world-changing as Gutenberg's introduction of the printing press. Digital publishing makes works available instantly, anywhere in the world, while eliminating the high costs of transportation, storage and retail facilities. Since digital publishing became widespread in 2000, the sales of digital works has accelerated astronomically.
Project Gutenberg
Digital publishing can be traced back to the formation of Project Gutenberg in 1971 by Michael Hart. On July 4, Hart found himself with a copy of the Declaration of Independence and many millions of dollars worth of computer time. This document became the first digitized publication and led to the first free online public-domain library.
Twenty years after its inception, Project Gutenberg held fewer than 100 books, but with the inception of the World Wide Web around 1994, volunteers and contributions helped Project Gutenberg grow exponentially. In June 2010, Project Gutenberg held over 32,000 digitized books and was adding 10 to 14 more daily.
Project Gutenberg was the inspiration and model for dozens of similar digital libraries. Today, well over a million texts are available in some digital form.
CD-ROM Publications
In the 1990s, magazines began experimenting with alternate methods of distribution as a means to avoid paper printing. Because few people at the time had an Internet connection, the logical way of distributing these magazines was via large-capacity removable media---CD-ROMs being the logical choice at the time. The magazines were composed either in early HTML or in a proprietary markup language.
When the Internet became more widespread, most of these magazines died out. Many large magazines like "National Geographic," wanting to take advantage of the cost savings of digital technology but not wanting to distribute their properties without digital-rights management (DRM), produced copies of archival works on CD-ROMs for retail distribution; as of 2010, such works are still widely available.
Pioneering Electronic Publishers
In 1998, websites selling books in digital form but available as print publications began opening up. While these books could be read on computers, they were really designed to take advantage of new e-reader handheld devices. A year later, Baen Publishing opened the Baen Online Library, offering free downloads of in-copyright books by Baen speculative fiction writers, as well as a similar paid service, Webscriptions. Steven King tried the new technology as well, publishing "Riding the Bullet" and the serialized "Plant" as e-books.
The first fully digital publishers rose from niche interest areas. Ellora's Cave, started in 2001 by author Jaid Black, published romantic erotica, a niche Black had recognized as lacking content. Today, Ellora's Cave and other publishing companies with roots in digital publishing are branching out to print-on-demand and other physical formats to compete with the traditional publishers.
E-readers
While e-books work well on computers, readers are used to holding their books. E-readers filled that need. The first e-readers were developed using backlit screens; because of eye fatigue, customers quickly lost interest. Around 2003, e-paper, a technology using electrically arrangeable pigments behind a clear screen, became viable for the mass market. New non-backlit e-readers were pioneered by Sony in 2004, but they sold slowly. When Amazon introduced its Kindle e-reader in 2007, it added the revolutionary idea of a wireless link to Amazon's bookstore to instantly download new book purchases. The idea of having a bookstore in your pocket appealed to many users, and the market took off.
Google Books
At about the same time that Amazon introduced Kindle, Google was working on a new type of search engine. Technicians went to large university libraries and began to scan entire collections of books, creating searchable PDFs for a new database. While there were some copyright issues early on, the Google Books search engine caught on quickly. Over a million books in the new library that are out of copyright can be freely downloaded and read as PDFs.
The 2010 E-reader Revolution
Starting in 2009, there was a quiet revolution in the e-reading world. Amazon introduced two new versions of its Kindle e-reader, and Sony introduced one with wireless technology. Barnes & Noble introduced an online library with several compatible e-readers, including its popular Nook. E-book sales have increased astronomically, from fairly flat annual sales below $10 million per year from 2002 through the end of 2005 to reported sales of nearly $91 million in the first quarter alone of 2010---a 70 percent increase over the previous quarter's sales.
Tags: Project Gutenberg, Amazon introduced, Amazon introduced Kindle, digital form, Digital publishing
