The ebook's inventor is disputed, with rival claims from a Jesuit to a Spanish schoolteacher
Ask who invented the ebook and you get a crowded answer. A Jesuit priest digitising Thomas Aquinas in 1946, a Spanish teacher with an air-powered reading machine in 1949, and an Illinois student who typed the Declaration of Independence into a mainframe in 1971 all have backers.
The dream is older still. In 1930, after seeing his first talking picture, the writer Bob Brown called for a portable reading machine that could plug into any light socket and let him get through a hundred-thousand-word novel in ten minutes. His real passion was reinventing spelling and punctuation, but he did foresee adjustable type and a device small enough to carry.
Roberto Busa began his electronic index of Aquinas's works in 1946 and finished in the 1970s; critics say it was a research tool rather than a book. Ángela Ruiz Robles of Ferrol patented her Mechanical Encyclopedia in 1949, loading text on spools so her pupils could carry fewer books. It never went into production, but a prototype sits in a museum in A Coruña. In the 1960s Andries van Dam's systems at Brown University offered hyperlinks and automatic indexes, and he is usually credited with coining the phrase electronic book.
Michael Hart is the name many publications give. Handed generous time on a University of Illinois mainframe in 1971, he typed out the Declaration of Independence in plain text so anyone could download it, and Project Gutenberg grew from there. Hardware followed: Sony's Data Discman read books off CDs in 1992, and a 1993 freeware program called EBook, which remembered your last page, may have spread the word itself.
Formats splintered as devices multiplied, until a consortium in the late 1990s built the Open eBook standard, the ancestor of today's EPUB. By the early 2010s ebooks outnumbered hardcovers in US publication figures, and by 2021 some 30 percent of American adults had read one in the past year, up from 17 percent in 2011. Searchable text makes technical books a particularly good fit.
Source: Ebook
