50 years of eBooks: 1971-2021 | Hacker News Reader

50 years of eBooks: 1971-2021

gutenberg.org

117 pointsdredmorbius36 comments

Some images or more descriptive text would help understand what an ebook might have looked like in 1970? Was it just an idea, or were there prototypes?

This was a time when people were photographing paper books to make microfilms (sometimes destructively), and then to look at microfilms you needed a bulky enlarger.

I really don't understand what "ebbok" could have meant then.

What do you mean by "destructively"?

It's easier to scan or photograph loose sheets than a bound book. If you want to do it fast it's much easier to cut the pages out of the bindings.

They destroyed the books to scan them. They cut the pages to send them to a scanner, and discarded them afterwards. It was a horrible tragedy.

Indeed, the book scanning project at Google at one point involved removing the spine of a book with a bandsaw, then scanning the loose pages.

For fun, they collected the sawed-off spines and glued them to boards fashioned to look like bookcases. The office looked like a library, but there were no books on the "shelves," only spines.

Generally: unbinding the leaves of a book so that they can be more easily handled by a scanner, often including an automated feeder.

The simplest method is to simply cut off the binding (a powered paper cutter can do this in an instant).

The alternative is nondestructive scanning, where the binding and publication as a whole remain intact. This is typically performed using flatbed scanners, angled scanners (the book is either face up or face down on a scanning bed which typically forms a ~90 degree angle), automated feeders which incorporate page turning (via numerous methods), or face-up scanning with digital deconvolution of page distortions. Higher speed presents higher risks of both poor / missed scans, and damaging original materials. Methods should be tuned to the materials, their intrinsic value and/or uniqueness, and end goals.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_scanning#Destructive_scan...

There are numerous book-scanning projects with YouTube videos of their methods. Typical rates range from ~300 -- 3,000 pages/hour, with 1,000 pp/hr being a good middling rate.

DIY 1,000 pp/h

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ne-h7FTMZBk

https://youtube.com/watch?v=RdLcrNeWjIs

Commercial, manual page turning:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=adQjU9JAWfw

3,000 pp/h vacuum page turning

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cmhIJOqepVU

... capable of managing very thick volumes:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=SdipuAuWsEs

Google fully automated linear scanbot:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=4JuoOaL11bw

Face-up, no-platten, with deconvolution:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iAmrch_1f2U

Text files. ASCII text. The same page has a link to a Project Gutenberg book about the first 45 years of digitizing ebooks. First document he did was the U.S Declaration of Independence hand typed on a teletype. They didn't get a scanner and OCR until the 90s and didn't move to HTML until then either.

Actually, EBCDIC, which was the character encoding used on the SDS Sigma series computer Hart first had access to. But yes, flatfile text documents.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDS_Sigma_series

There's a slightly more technical history linked from the submitted article:

https://www.gutenberg.org/about/background/history_and_philo...

Okay... but how is a text file an "ebook"? I'm not sure I understand it today, so I certainly will not blame anyone for not understanding it at the time ;-)

It's a book, and it's electronic

I mean, if you put all the text from a book into a txt file, how is it not an ebook? Does being an "ebook" come from being a digital representation of a book, or is it a reserved title for something in a specific file format created for the purpose such as .epub or .mobi? As far as I know ebook just means electronic book, and a txt file can check both those boxes if it has the right content.

I answered below, but my point is it's hard to conceptualize an "ebook" without an ebook reader. (Of course the technical format is irrelevant.)

But there are lots of things you can do with an ebook besides read it. One thing that started earlier than people might think is "digital humanities"; that is literary analysis by computer. You could do things like look at word usage in a text by an unknown author and compare it to word usages by known authors and try to identify the author. Or you could compare versions of a text and basically make an evolutionary tree of changes and use this to infer what the original version was like. Of course people had been doing these things by hand, but having computer readable ebooks made it possible to write programs to do them.

Digitised text is the essence of a book.

Hart's goal wasn't hardware. It was the (compartively) harder task of getting text into digital format.

Written language is highly presentation-independent.

Yeah, you're right, but that's what's difficult for me to accept. A traditional book is a piece of hardware. It's a bunch of paper pages tied together, with some content printed on the pages.

If you separate the content from the hardware, you hardly have a "book", e- or not. You have some content floating around, and big machines that are difficult to use and even more difficult to access (cost, scarcity, location) to read it.

That's probably the genius of inventors: they see things that aren't there.

You've had the answer, several times.

You don't like it.

The problem doesn't lie with the answer.

I'm not arguing. I'm just trying to explain my gut reaction. But it's really not important.

I feel for your "gut". Often, if I'm learning a new math concept, my head says, "Yeah, I can do that manipulation just fine," but my gut says, "Something's not right here. Nope. Uh huh. Don't like it." And it's very hard to shake gut reactions be they true or false.

Here's a rhetorical question: When I read a Kindle-format book from Amazon on the Kindle Cloud Reading app on my laptop, what did I just read? Was it an eBook or not? If not, was it a book in any sense? If someone asks, "Did you read the book, The Cuckoo's Egg?" I'd answer yes, even though I read it electronically -- which is, I presume what the e in eBook stands for. Or do I answer, "No," because it was just digital data on a computer -- absent a standalone eBook device?

I have an eBook reader that came as part of the Calibre package, at least they call it an eBook reader -- it's just a program to read epubs. Is it is, or is it ain't an eBook reader?

A "book" is a container for "text" - a support that can be made metaphorically akin to light (beech) bark (the "book") as a container for some weaving of expression of ideas (the "text"), is such.

The container could be whatever. If there exists a text, there probably exists a book (the content, in fact, is not «floating around»). If that is magnetic tape, so be it. And if that is an abstraction for a physical container - a file, i.e. a labelled pointer to an array of data -, again, so be it.

The file is the book; its physicality - irrelevant and interchangeable, but given - could be the magnetic tape, cards etc. that host it.

Etymological note: book itself seems to come from the beech tree, and referred originally to tablets inscribed on wood.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/book

It's also worth noting that what we now refer to as a "book" is more properly a codex, also ultimately from a reference to a tree trunk, but defined as a collection of leaves of paper or parchment (or folios or signatures) sewn into a binding with covers, as distinguished from a scroll.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/codex

https://www.etymonline.com/word/code

And of course, scrolls and tablets were the original forms of books.

The notion that a book must be a specific physical representation of paper, binding, and covers, or even physical is ... at odds with origin and usage.

> book itself seems to come from the beech tree

I wrote that explicitly ;)

Note also the other side: something is a "text" when it is textile in quality, in the context of elaborating the expression of ideas: you "weave" the expressions of your thoughts into a "text".

Also note that "liber" means bark like 'book' does (though on the technical, craft side of "peeling"), and "paper" clearly refers to papyrus.

You have terms for the container and terms for the content. The "book" is not a «specific physical representation», but is the side of the container.

Gah! I've reached the age when writing is easier than reading .... Sorry!

"Textile" (a woven fabric) is another great one, yes, thanks.

Diving into other etymologies and origins of other words based around information (literally, to form an impression), truth and trust, etc., is interesting. Many of the words for the most ephemeral concepts are deeply ... rooted ... in the profoundly physical, tactile, and material.

> interesting

To my "school", a necessary duty :)

> in the profoundly physical, tactile, and material

That depends. Some scholars identify a number of key concepts as construction blocks of their many derived terms. Not all of them are concrete - some are extremely subtle (also to be productive of so many different, yet related concepts).

For example, you write 'physical': some identify the root of that term in an immaterial concept of a dynamic principle, as if expressed by the explosive phoneme, that pertains immediately to "physical", "future", "foliage" in this construction assumed to express a "spawning". Similarly to 'material' ("measure", "mathematics"...), that some see as coming from the key root concept of limited extensions.

In the development of the terms and idea, concretion and abstraction may follow each other ("measure", "moon", "month"...).

You need to follow the links to get the details. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/27045/pg27045.html "On July 4, 1971, on Independence Day, Michael keyed in The United States Declaration of Independence (signed on July 4, 1776) to the mainframe he was using."

As for what it looked like, well that would depend on your terminal at the time.

I clearly remember devices marketed as digital books in the early 90s, but back around the time we were both born it was just about reading an ascii file on a glass teletype I suppose :)

Michael Hart's vision was for a future in which computing costs were dramatically lower, access and availability vastly higher. Presentation capabilities of the then-current era were far less a concern.

His goal was to create the digital files themselves, which once they existed in digital form could be endlessly replicated at no cost:

Michael decided there was nothing he could do, in the way of “normal computing,” that would repay the huge value of the computer time he had been given … so he had to create $100,000,000 worth of value in some other manner. An hour and 47 minutes later, he announced 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.

He then proceeded to type in the “Declaration of Independence” and tried to send it to everyone on the networks … which can only be described today as a not so narrow miss at creating an early version of what was later called the “Internet Virus.”

A friendly dissuasion from this yielded the first posting of a document in electronic text, and Project Gutenberg was born as Michael stated that he had “earned” the $100,000,000 because a copy of the Declaration of Independence would eventually be an electronic fixture in the computer libraries of 100,000,000 of the computer users of the future.

In 1971, access would have required mainframe access, either on a line printer or via one of the early CRT-based computer terminals. This Seattle Computer Museum image shows the less-interesting side of the terminal:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/LCM_-_Xe...

(From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDS_Sigma_series)

Apparently the Tektronix 4010 was used with the SDS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tektronix_4010

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Tektroni...

On an IBM platform (and possibly others), the IBM 2250, first released in 1964:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_2250

> I really don't understand what [the idea of an electronic book] could have meant then

Files containing text, electronically accessible, and allowing preservation through automation as files allow (transmission, duplication, versatile electronic storage).

I have to say, learning I could download books off the internet and read them on my Palm was a transformative experience as a child.

Achually 30 years as HP100LX was the first pocketable device, you can turn sideways and read like a book, with "Vertical Reader" at http://mizj.com/ .

A noteable achievement, but it doesn't contradict the article. Perhaps HP100LX fits your definition of an eBook and the prior work does not, can you explain why?

Total replacement of the concept "book". Fits into your pocket and so on.

10 Megabytes was the maximum disk at the time of 1992 costing 1000 gringo dolares. With careful zipping it was hundreds of books.

The Sony Data Discman predates the HP by years. This is about eBooks as a concept/file and what Project Gutenberg was doing and not readers anyways.

I tried that too. It was just horrible. If we drop the pocketable feature, Data General One was quite good ebook. It was 1982 maybe.

Gutenberg project was an amazing finding for me in the 90s. It's a pity after bought the first kindle I almost totally forgot it.

Gutenberg is nice, but there is also libgen for books that are not available on Gutenberg

I agree, and rely very heavily on LibGen.

That said, Project Gutenberg and Michael Hart's vision and effort are iconic and really cannot be overstated. LibGen and its ilk owe a huge debt to his work.

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