A Short History of EBooks

In January 1997, during the Symposium on Multimedia Convergence organized by the International Labor Organization (ILO), Wilfred Kiboro, managing director of Nation Printers and Publishers, in Kenya, expressed the idea of a printing system through a satellite internet connection, instead of carrying newspapers every day by truck all over the country

"regardless of how advanced our computers become, we should never use them as a substitute for our own basic cognitive skills of awareness, perception, reasoning, and judgment."

the technorealist approach involves a continuous critical examination of how technologies - whether cutting-edge or mundane - might help or hinder us in the struggle to improve the quality of our personal lives, our communities, and our economic, social, and political structures"

The "Technorealism" movement started on the web in March 1998. Technorealism was "an attempt to assess the social and political implications of technologies so that we might all have more control over the shape of our future.

More generally, Michael Hart should be given more credit as the inventor of the electronic book (ebook)

In the 16th century, Gutenberg allowed anyone to have print books for a small cost. In the 21st century, Project Gutenberg would allow anyone to have a digital library at no cost

The electronic book (ebook) was born in 1971, with the first steps of Project Gutenberg, a digital library for books from public domain.