The excerpt ends with this passage about Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg in 1971. That's right, 1971. In many ways, eBooks aren't a new idea. However, these days all of the technologies (not sure about the business models) to power and view eBooks appear to be aligning.
In 1971 Michael Hart at the University of Illinois began Project Gutenberg (PG) by creating electronic texts of small, public-domain works, beginning with the *Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the US Constitution. These were hand-keyed: a labour-intensive, and volunteer, effort. When the capacity of storage media increased, PG digitized larger books, including Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and the Bible; and with the development of affordable optical character recognition (*OCR) technology by the mid-1990s, PG could rely on a speedier processing method, which eventually had nearly the same accuracy as rekeying. This pioneer initiative continues on 40 mirror sites with thousands of books that can be read on any computer, personal digital assistant (PDA), or reading device.
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