Ebooks and ereaders have a long and often surprising history–and some unexpected parallels to overall history of books and reading. Mary and Laura take you through it with special guest Dorothea Salo.
Mary Needham 00:00
Let's go ahead and start with, how do you define an ebook?
Dorothea Salo 00:04
Oh, I try not to, because there are an awful lot of things that count as ebooks.
Laura Crossett 00:24
That was Dorothea Salo, Distinguished Faculty Associate at the Information School at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. And this is A Podcast About Ebooks from Library Futures. It's a three part mini series that's going to tell you how ebooks came to be, what happened when they entered libraries, and what we can do about the problems that ensued. This is Episode 1: So What is an Ebook Anyway? I am Laura, Communications Manager at Library Futures,
Mary Needham 00:55
And I'm Mary, intern at Library Futures.
Laura Crossett 00:59
And we are here because while at Library Futures we talk about ebooks all the time, I had never really thought about just exactly what an ebook is. And so Mary and I have been on a quest.
Mary Needham 01:14
Yes we have, and we're going to tell you all about it – ebooks, ereaders, a little history of each and more. But first, Laura, you decided before we could define an ebook, we had to start by figuring out what a book is. So what did you find out?
Laura Crossett 01:30
Well, it turns out that's also a hard question. As many listeners will know, there are entire graduate programs dedicated to the history of the book, and there are countless monographs and articles on the subject. But for the purposes of this podcast, and with all due apologies to the real experts on this huge topic, which I'm going to condense greatly and unfairly from the wonderful Illustrated Oxford History of the Book, edited by James Raven for this podcast, we're going to say that a book is an object with writing in it that is portable.
Mary Needham 02:09
Oh, portability is interesting for reasons having to do with ebooks that we'll get into in a little bit. But back to a book is an object with writing on it that's portable. That's a fantastic definition. Does it matter what kind of writing is on it?
Laura Crossett 02:23
That's also a good question. So in the sense of “thing with writing on it that's portable,” the earliest books date back, you know, like 5000 years, give or take, when people kind of simultaneously in Mesopotamia and in Egypt and in China start writing things on clay tablets or on papyrus, or on animal skins or on wooden boards covered with wax, or, you know, kind of anything you can imagine. And really early on, they're using a lot of this for, like, basically, sort of administrative stuff. Those are the first things that get defined as books. But that's a little like saying, like, the phone book is the book.
Mary Needham 03:09
Yeah? That's not so interesting,
Laura Crossett 03:11
Yeah, useful sometimes, but not so exciting. So the first things that I think we would think of as books are mostly religious and cultural texts. So the Vedas and the Confucian classics and the Bible, other texts like those. Eventually they figure out movable type in China, and, of course, Gutenberg eventually figures it out in Europe. So the book is a thing with writing in it that's portable, and it conveys some kind of information, you know, whether that's just sort of like very factual information, or whether that's like this very important cultural or religious record, and it turns out that historically, books have been considered both wonderful and controversial in ways that I think may have some echoes for today. So for instance, the first full edition of the works of Confucius was produced with wood block prints, and it was finished in 954, and this is one guy talking about it back then:
Mia Jakobsen 04:12
When I was young, there were only one or two scholars in every 100 who possessed copies of all the classics and commentaries. There was no way to copy so many works today. Printed editions of these works are abundant, and officials and commoners alike have them in their homes.
Laura Crossett 04:29
So as a librarian, of course, more people having more books sounds great to me, but it turns out that some people back then thought that everybody having books was bad because it cheapened learning, because it meant just any old person could have the book and the information, and also, if you had the book, you didn't have to memorize everything. You could just cheat. It was just there in front of you. You didn't learn it.
Mary Needham 04:56
Can you imagine having to memorize everything? A lot of this is sounding eerily similar also to ebooks and ereaders, actually.
Laura Crossett 05:04
Oh, really, so I am curious to hear about this. Mary, while was off looking into just what a book is, you were researching the history of ebooks. What did you find out?
Mary Needham 05:18
Well, what I learned is that similar to your story, it is a little complicated, and I can't really tell you that story without telling you how ereaders started, because you can't really get one without the other. So the history is a twisted little tale that weaves within those two things, ebooks and ereaders and also the evolution of technology, specifically computers and the internet. But we won't touch on that too much on this podcast. That could be its own podcast, I think, and it probably already is. And it's also kind of controversial, as the first inventor of the ebook is not really agreed upon. Oh, and also, a similar disclaimer to yours, this history is not comprehensive,
Laura Crossett 06:00
Cool, so we've already got, like, the classic podcast set up of, you know, I can't tell you about x until I tell you about y. And it makes sense, because if a book is something with writing in it, that's portable, then an ebook would need that portability, right?
Mary Needham 06:20
That's right, and that's where the ereader comes in. Okay, so we actually have to start back in the 1930s if you can believe it.
Laura Crossett 06:20
No, I can't.
Mary Needham 06:30
So in the 1930s there was this American writer and publisher named Bob Brown. Back then, silent movies were a big thing. They were all the rage. But in 1927, the first movie with sound came out. These were called the talkies.
Laura Crossett 06:49
The talkies! So cute! Let's go to the talkies this afternoon, Mary! I know, I'm obsessed.
Mary Needham 06:56
So our guy, Bob, in response to watching his first talkie, decided to write a manifesto, which he titled The Readies. Isn't that
Laura Crossett 07:06
possibly even better?
Mary Needham 07:08
I know I need a copy of this book, by the way. I'm looking for it right now.
Laura Crossett 07:13
Okay, let me know.
Mary Needham 07:14
I'll let you know if I find it. There actually are a couple libraries near me that have it.
Laura Crossett 07:18
So sweet. All right.
Mary Needham 07:20
And in this manifesto, he stated his feelings on the talkies and how he felt that they were out-maneuvering books and reading. And due to this, he felt that reading needed to find a new medium, a new format, and that format was electronic and portable. To go back to your definition of a book, something with writing that is portable, I think I'm, you know, sensing a theme here. Here's a quote from his manifesto,
Mia Jakobsen 07:48
A simple reading machine which I can carry or move around, attach to any old electric light, plug and read 100,000 word novels in 10 minutes, if I want to. And I want to.
Mary Needham 08:01
And this is the prediction that made him known as the godfather of the ereader.
Laura Crossett 08:06
The godfather of the e eader, and also, apparently, the godfather of, like, speed reading. I don't know. Yeah, I kind of want to this thing that'll read me 1000 100,000-word novels in 10 minutes. Would have been very handy in school,
Mary Needham 08:24
Yeah, think of all the knowledge you could gain so quickly, right?
Laura Crossett 08:28
Alright. So, uh, so you said, though, that there's more.
START
Mary Needham 08:36
So there's more. Next up we have Ángela Ruiz Robles. Okay, so, Ángela Ruiz Robles, in 1949 created a device called Enciclopedia Mecanica, or the Mechanical Encyclopedia. This device ran on compressed air, had text and graphics on spools that loaded onto rotating spindles. Scrolls could be swapped out. They each had text and topics on them, or maybe images, depending on what the spool was. It was pale green in color and about the size of a textbook. It was also battery operated, and even had a little light bulb on it for eating in the dark.
Laura Crossett 09:15
I would so want to see this thing.
Mary Needham 09:18
I know. I want to see it operate. The prototype is actually on display at the National Museum of Science and Technology in A Coruña, Spain. So I think we should go there and go look at it in person at some point.
Laura Crossett 09:32
We’ll catch a talkie and we'll get Bob's manifesto, and then we'll have a flight to Spain so we can
Mary Needham 09:39
yep, exactly
Laura Crossett 09:40
go see Ángela's masterpiece.
Mary Needham 09:44
The device, sadly, never made it to production, not without Ángela and her family trying super hard. But today, Ángela is credited with creating the first automated reader.
Laura Crossett 09:54
Nice.
Mary Needham 09:54
Yeah, and I just have to say Ángela clearly sounded like a total boss. She was a dedicated teacher that cared deeply about her students, which is why she invented this device in the first place. She wanted to make learning easier by lightening her students' book loads like, literally, you know, everything would just be in one thin, rather than having your students carry 400 different books. I could go on.
Laura Crossett 10:18
Also an idea I'm behind.
Mary Needham 10:20
Yeah, I know I could go on and on about her. She could have her own episode, but she's often overlooked in this conversation on ebooks and e readers, so I felt it was important to talk about her.
Laura Crossett 10:30
Wait, you're telling me that there was a woman in technology who was overlooked by history?
Mary Needham 10:40
I know. Can you believe it? Okay, Shocked. Shocked, absolutely shocked. Okay, one last thing, speaking of overlooked in 2023 The New York Times included Angela in their series called Overlooked No More. I think it's a series of obituaries, which is kind of cool.
Laura Crossett 11:01
Yeah, it's obituaries of women they like maybe should have written obituaries of at the time, but
Mary Needham 11:04
yeah, that's really sad and lovely that they included her in 2023 though. Yeah, um, there's a lot of great information about her in that article, but here's a quote that really stood out to me and shows what kind of person that she was.
Mia Jakobsen 11:20
We come to this world not only to live our life as comfortable as possible, but to worry about others so that they can benefit from something offered by us.
Laura Crossett 11:31
That is great. And I think she, like, she could be a librarian, right?
Mary Needham 11:37
Totally.
Laura Crossett 11:38
She's a person who cares about making knowledge available to other people, and she wanted to use technology to do it.
Mary Needham 11:44
Yep–and a very early fundamental player in the history of ebooks and e readers. RIP, queen
Laura Crossett 11:53
Yeah!
Mary Needham 11:54
So later we have Douglas Engelbart at Stanford and Andries Van Dam at Brown, both of which are working on projects involving text editors and file retrieval systems. Andries, though, is credited as creator of the term electronic book.
Laura Crossett 12:10
Okay, so guys, so at universities, doing stuff,
Mary Needham 12:14
yeah, kind of things that are building, you know, to this building toward
Laura Crossett 12:17
building toward the eventual thing, right, standing on the shoulders of giants and all that.
Mary Needham 12:23
Yes, exactly. Yeah. So then we have Michael Hart, who is often, you know, that's the name we all see as the inventor of the ebook. He's credited as being the inventor of the ebook. So in 1971 Michael Hart, while at the University of Illinois, was given pretty much unlimited, free access to a computer, which was unheard of at the time. This is 1971 it would have been super difficult to have access and really expensive.
Laura Crossett 12:51
Yeah, I wonder how he managed that.
Mary Needham 12:55
It sounds like he knew someone there, maybe a friend that helped him out. Like here, have access, unlimited access to this computer. And he was like, okay. And this was a Xerox Sigma Five. It was one of those early computers that filled, you know, an entire room.
Laura Crossett 13:12
Oh, yeah, I saw one of those. I don't think it was that kind. But at the college where my dad was teaching in the late 70s, I was a really, really little girl, and my dad took me in one day and was like, here's the computer. And it was like a room with a bunch of things in it that made noises, and then it had one of those printers with the green and white striped paper, which I got to have some of to draw on.
Mary Needham 13:39
That's awesome. What a cool memory. Yeah. So, yeah, the Xerox Sigma Five was that kind of computer, and was first made in 1967. This computer was attached to a network. And again, remember, this is 1971 way before the Internet as we know it today. Michael happened to have a copy of the Declaration of Independence on him, as you do just a little pamphlet.
Laura Crossett 14:02
I mean, who doesn't really
Mary Needham 14:05
[laughing] a little pamphlet of the Declaration of Independence and
Laura Crossett 14:07
“When in the course of human events” – maybe he had it memorized.
Mary Needham 14:12
Maybe!
Laura Crossett 14:13
The Confucian scholars would have been proud of him.
Mary Needham 14:16
Totally. He decided to type it up in plain text and send it out via this network, essentially digitizing it. After this, he started Project Gutenberg.
Laura Crossett 14:27
Oh, yeah, Project Gutenberg, which is, of course a, like a giant repository of free public domain ebooks that have all been typed up by volunteers over, well, I guess, since 197. And they named after Gutenberg, the European movable type guy, right?
Mary Needham 14:45
Yep, exactly. There's another tie-in from your story earlier. But yes, as you just said, Project Gutenberg ended up being the first project to make ebooks freely available, aka the first digital library. So. To date, there are over 70,000 free ebooks in the collection.
Laura Crossett 15:05
Right. And I know they focus exclusively on public domain because that's stuff they can get free access to. And of course, it's growing because we get more public domain material every year now. But one question I've been thinking about: so, like, a book, we already established is a thing with writing in it that's portable. And you've told us something about the early ereaders, and now you've told us a bit about the first ebook. Seems like Project Gutenberg really kind of like figured out the ebook format, but it's – we don't still have that, like ebook plus ereader combination yet, right? Like that thing that makes the electronic book into a thing you can carry around with you the way that you would carry, you know, paperback around or a book from the library. So when, when do those things finally meet up?
Mary Needham 16:02
That's a great question. Remember what Dorothea said when I asked her about how she would define an ebook?
Dorothea Salo 16:10
Oh, I try not to, because there are an awful lot of things that count as ebooks. The expanded term that we derive ebook from is electronic book. And in the very, extremely early days of ebooks, like even before I got involved in ebooks, there were things like digital talking books and there were e-encyclopedias. There was just around the dot-com boom around the turn of the century, there was a lot of experimentation going on. Like, what would an ebook look like? How would it behave? What could you do with it? This settled down after a while, not after – I mean, you know, there were some very ill-advised experiments. Let me just lay that out there. But it did settle down. But it didn't settle down into one thing, but into kind of a continuum of things. At the very, very simple end, you can look at, for example, Project Gutenberg, where an ebook is basically a transcribed text file from the codex with, like, no layout information, no structural information, no nothing. It's just the text. But is it an ebook? Yes, I would argue that it is.
Laura Crossett 17:37
Right. So by that accounting, the Declaration of Independence on Project Gutenberg is an ebook. Or, you know, I could just pull up a copy of Walden, and I could read that on my computer, but it's just, you know, it's big blocks of text, no margins, and I have to sit here at my computer to read it. So don't quite have the, like, the ebook feel we're looking for.
Mary Needham 18:01
Right? So there are other things that try out for ebook status,
Dorothea Salo 18:07
PDFs. There are a lot of PDFs around of all kinds of books, from relatively simple like beach reading type books all the way on up to extremely complicated scholarly research textbooks, that kind of thing. Technical books. Are those ebooks? Yeah, I would argue that they are. They're very, very tied to the physical book. However, these these PDF books,
Laura Crossett 18:39
Yeah, so I, I mean, I've read some, some books as PDF in like, good and bad ways, right? Like, so I've had textbooks that came as PDFs, and those were a major pain in the neck because they didn't really, they don't really fit on your computer screen, like, nicely, because the page is designed, not oriented to, like, a computer screen. And then they're like, if you have like an iPad, it's like, not the text is like, too small. So you're either like, zooming in and out and scrolling up and down. But then there are things that like sometimes, if I want to read like a book that's poetry, and I really care about this spacing and the line breaks and whatnot, like an ePub book doesn't really preserve that in the same way, or doesn't necessarily, and so I will sometimes go seek out like a scanned PDF copy of a book. And there are things that there are advantages about that. So have some feelings pro and con on the PDF as ebook thing.
Mary Needham 18:50
Got it.
Dorothea Salo 19:53
Finally, there are the books that I think you are possibly most interested in, and those are the books that build on kind of the World Wide Web as as a technology base. If you look at the standard EPUB, which was built for ebooks, and which I actually had input into way back in the day, that is built on HTML, which is the markup language of the web. It's built on cascading style sheets, which is the “make it pretty” language of the web. We avoided, largely avoided, the JavaScript plague, which is good. I really think that that's a good thing. But still, this is, this is an ebook standard that is built on web standards, and while that is less tied to the physical book, it can do things, especially if you're good with your cascading style sheets, that make it reminiscent enough of a physical book to make a lot of physical book lovers pretty happy.
Laura Crossett 21:03
So I just want to insert here that when Dorothea says she, quote, “had input into the EPUB standard,” I think we should clarify that she was actually on the working group that helped develop the standard, and she has a lot more to say about that, that gets a lot more technical. But for now, suffice it to say that if you have ever built a web page from scratch, which you still can do, HTML and CSS are the things that you use, and EPUB, which is the standard format for most of the books we now read on our phones and tablets and ereaders is built on those things, and it started its life as an open standard, open like open source software or open culture licenses or, you know, just things that we want to share openly and freely online,
Mary Needham 21:53
Right? So you asked how ebooks met ereaders? Well, I think now we have to skip ahead a little bit further to 2007 to something. You might have heard of the Amazon Kindle? Ever? Ever heard of it?
Laura Crossett 22:07
Yeah, I think I might have heard of that.
Mary Needham 22:11
The Amazon Kindle was released, which was a complete game changer in the world of e readers, as we all know. The Kindle made ebook super accessible to the general public.
Laura Crossett 22:21
Yeah, it was super popular. Still is, and it really is sort of, I think we were saying it's kind of like the Model T of ereaders. Like there were cars before the Model T, and there were ereaders before the Kindle, but the Model T is like the thing where suddenly people, regular people, buy a car and drive it, and the Kindle is, I think, the e reader that made it like regular people could just get an e reader and read books on it.
Mary Needham 22:47
Totally.
Laura Crossett 22:48
And it is still, I think, the dominant player in the book market and and really is where ebooks and ereaders finally meet, and you finally this dream that people, all these people had of the thing that I can carry around in my pocket and read all 100,000 books, maybe not in 10 minutes, but have them all there. But I'm going to just note here that the Kindle does have its own problems when it comes to library ebooks, which are other problems for another episode of this podcast.
Mary Needham 23:30
Ooh, I love the foreshadowing.
Laura Crossett 23:32
So Mary, given all that we've learned, how would you define an ebook?
Mary Needham 23:39
Okay, so if a book is a thing that has writing on it, that's portable, an ebook is an electronic thing that has writing in it. But the actual definition, according to Britannica, is “a digital file containing a body of text and images suitable for distributing electronically and displaying on screen in a manner similar to a printed book.”
Laura Crossett 24:00
“A manner similar to a printed book.”
Mary Needham 24:03
Uh huh.
Laura Crossett 24:04
Yeah, so I don't know. I just all through all this, I keep thinking there's a passage in the introduction to that Oxford Illustrated History of the Book in which James Raven says that
“people have always striven to store, circulate and retrieve knowledge and information through books.” Storing, circulating, and retrieving knowledge and information is what libraries do, but it's also kind of the big promise of the internet, right? Is that we're going to be able to have all this information universally available for you, and you can retrieve it at any time. And it seems like these early attempts at the ebook were really all about circulating and sharing that information and making it freely available and spreading it to everyone. And as someone who's been working on these in libraries and then on these issues for some years, I can tell you that is not exactly how ebooks and libraries work today.
[Music]
Mary Needham 25:13
In our next episode, we're going to hear from some of the librarians directly affected by the past, present and future of ebooks in libraries.
Laura Crossett 25:21
I cannot wait.
[Music]
Laura Crossett 25:27
This has been episode one of A Podcast About Ebooks from Library Futures. Stay tuned for Episode Two wherever fine podcasts are found. If you have heard anything here that intrigues you, there is a link to Mary's excellent interactive ebook timeline in the show notes, as well as links to our sources. Library Futures is a project of the Engelberg Center on Innovation, Law and Policy at New York University. You can find us online at libraryfutures.net, where you can sign up for our low volume email list, and you can follow us on social @libraryfutures.
Mary Needham 26:06
We have a number of people to thank: first and foremost, Dorothea Salo at the University of Wisconsin, for sharing so much of her time and expertise with us. At Library Futures, we'd like to thank Executive Director, Jennie Rose Halperin and Michelle Reed, Director of Programs, including our amazing internship program. Thanks to Michael Weinberg at the Engelberg Center for his support and excellent feedback throughout this process. Matthew Whitely wrote our theme music and Library Futures intern Mia Jacobson graciously read several of our quotations.
Laura Crossett 26:38
And enormous thanks to all libraries and librarians everywhere, with extra thanks to the NYU Libraries, the Iowa City Public Library and the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library at San Jose State University for providing the resources and expertise that inform our work. We would also like to give a special shout out to the Internet Archive for their work in preserving so many of the old blog posts, news articles, podcasts and other materials that aided in our research and that contains so much of the history of ebooks in libraries. And thank you, Mary
Mary Needham 27:12
And thank you, Laura!
Laura Crossett 27:13
All right, see you next time. Bye!
Mary Needham 27:15
Bye!
[Music]