FROM PAPER TO PIXEL| Part — II
YOU all might think ebooks are things of the recent decade but in reality, It all started from project Gutenberg — the name linking it to its origin, the revolution of Guttenberg press in 1439, (for more info read our previous article) — which was commissioned in 1971 to digitalize all available text. The main concept was to organize and categorize knowledge for easy access.
In an essay by Vannevar Bush in 1945 titled ‘‘As We, May Think’’, he discussed the information balance and the influence information society has. He further explains a device called “Memex”, which closely resembled the modern-day ebook reading device. The Memex, according to Bush, is a device that would mechanize and store all books, records, and communications that may later be consulted with ease. Bush concept was way ahead of his time.
While the exposure and expansion that the Guttenberg's printing press witnessed across Europe in just 30 years, E-book is still a long way to catch up. The recent five years have witnessed the e-book revolution, with the ebooks and ebook readers growing exponentially.
Technological development has ushered an era of progress in the latter half of the first decade as we entered the twenty-first century and has enabled the user access to information, unlike at any time in the recorded history of man. The only hurdle was the technology of the time when the concept itself was nurturing,
‘‘the typical computer of this era was the size of two or three refrigerators back to back’’ (Hiltzik, 1999, p. xxi).
While the dream to have a device that enables the human mind access to information at demand was still a long way to reality. The concept itself seemed way ahead of its time but as it is said,
‘‘The best way to predict the future is to invent it’’
- (Barnes qtd. Kay, 2007, p. 19).
The dream of Kay, who had the inspiration to develop a programming language in an interactive way with help of animation and concepts which could be incorporated in a notebook-sized computer.
Chuck Thacker — an American graphic designer — finally developed the device Alto in the early 1970s, downside was it was expensive as the development cost was nearly $10,000. On the upside, The company which developed Alto, Xerox PARC was nearly 10 years ahead of its competitors Apple and IBM.
In April 1973, the first Alto became operational and displayed an animated image of the Cookie Monster, a Sesame Street character (Hiltzik, 1999). Vannevar Bush and Alan Kay’s dream of a portable electronic book was starting to become a reality
The first version of Alto could store approximately 1500 pages per disk. it seemed like a small TV set and had a mouse with an interactive user interface, graphic icons, and animations. it had a promising feature to add more disks to increase its capacity to handle and store Information.
The concept of Modern E-library was developed later by Micheal hart in 1971 in the shape of Project Guttenberg under the University of Illinois. He soon realized the replication of soft copy of books can be copied unlimited times using a method he called ‘‘Replicator Technology.’’; once a book or any other item (including pictures, sounds, and even 3-D items) can be stored in a computer, then unlimited copies can be made’’. By using the ASCII file format, 99% of all the computers which were being used around the world could read and access the files.
The expansion was so rapid and reach so vast that the Project Guttenberg was soon extended to 10,000 books in 2001 and As of 20 May 2020, Project Gutenberg had reached 62,108 items in its collection of free eBooks. The first text made available was the Declaration of Independence, followed by the Bill of Rights. There were two goals of Hart’s project, to be low in cost and easy to use.
All the recent developments in ebooks and comparative analysis between the hard copy and soft copy will be assessed in Part- III, which will be uploaded soon.
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