The eBook is 40 (1971-2011) Part 12

2003 > THE PUBLIC LIBRARY OF SCIENCE

[Summary]

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) was founded in October 2000 in California as a non-profit organization whose mission was to give access to the world's scientific and medical literature. In early 2003, PLoS created a non-profit scientific and medical publishing venture to provide scientists and physicians with free high-quality, high-profile online journals in which to publish their work. The journals were PLoS Biology (launched in 2003), PLoS Medicine (2004), PLoS Genetics (2005), PLoS Computational Biology (2005), PLoS Pathogens (2005), PLoS Clinical Trials (2006), and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases (2007), the first scientific journal on this topic. All PLoS articles are freely available online, on the websites of PLoS and in the public archive PubMed Central, run by the National Library of Medicine. The articles can be freely redistributed and reused under a Creative Commons license, including for translations, as long as the author(s) and source are cited.

Founded in October 2000, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) created a non-profit scientific and medical publishing venture in early 2003, to provide scientists and physicians with free high-quality, high-profile online journals in which to publish their work.

# PLoS as a catalyst

With the internet being a powerful medium to disseminate information, it seems quite outrageous that the results of research -- original works requiring many years of efforts -- are "squatted" by publishers claiming ownership on these works, and selling them at a high price.

The work of researchers is often publicly funded, especially in North America. It would therefore seem appropriate that the scientific community and the general public can freely enjoy the results of this research. 1,000 new scientific and medical articles reviewed by peers were published daily in 2000, with few of them free available on the internet.

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) was founded in October 2000 in San Francisco, California, as a non-profit organization whose mission was to make the world's scientific and medical literature a public resource in free online archives. Instead of information disseminated in millions of reports and thousands of online journals, a single point would give access to the full content of these articles, with a search engine and hyperlinks between articles.

PLoS posted an open letter requesting the articles presently published by journals to be distributed freely in online archives, and asking researchers to promote the publishers willing to support this project.

From October 2000 to September 2002, the open letter was signed by 30,000 scientists from 180 countries. The publishers' answer was much less enthusiastic, although a number of publishers agreed for their articles to be distributed freely immediately after publication, or six months after publication. But even the publishers who initially agreed to support the project made so many objections that it was finally abandoned.

# PLoS as a publisher

Another objective of PLoS was to become a publisher while creating a new model of online publishing based on free dissemination of knowledge. In early 2003, PLoS created a non-profit scientific and medical publishing venture to provide scientists and physicians with free high-quality, high-profile journals in which to publish their work. The journals were PLoS Biology (launched in 2003), PLoS Medicine (2004), PLoS Genetics (2005), PLoS Computational Biology (2005), PLoS Pathogens (2005), PLoS Clinical Trials (2006) and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases (2007), the first scientific journal on this topic.

All PLoS articles are freely available online, on the websites of PLoS and in the public archive PubMed Central, run by the National Library of Medicine. The articles can be freely redistributed and reused under a Creative Commons license, including for translations, as long as the author(s) and source are cited. PLoS also launched PLoS ONE, an online forum where people can publish articles on any subject relating to science or medicine.

Three years after they were created, PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine had the same reputation for excellence as the leading journals Nature, Science and The New England Journal of Medicine. PLoS received financial support from several foundations while developing a viable economic model from fees paid by published authors, advertising, sponsorship, and paid activities organized for PLoS members. PLoS also hopes to encourage other publishers to adopt the open access model, or to convert their existing journals to an open access model.

2004 > THE WEB 2.0, COMMUNITY AND SHARING

[Summary]

The term "web 2.0" was invented in 2004 by Tim O'Reilly, a publisher of computer books, as a t.i.tle for a series of conferences he was organizing. The web 2.0 has been based on community and sharing, with a wealth of websites whose content has been supplied by users, such as blogs, wikis, social networks and collaborative encyclopedias.

Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter, of course, but also tens of thousands of others. The web 2.0 may begin to fulfill the dream of Tim Berners- Lee, who invented the web in 1990, and wrote in an essay dated April 1998: "The dream behind the web is of a common information s.p.a.ce in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. ("The World Wide Web: A very short personal history", available on his webpage on the W3C website)

The term "web 2.0" was invented in 2004 by Tim O'Reilly, a publisher of computer books, as a t.i.tle for a series of conferences he was organizing.

The web 2.0 was based on community and sharing, with a wealth of websites whose content was supplied by users, such as blogs, wikis, social networks and collaborative encyclopedias. Wikipedia, Facebook and Twitter, of course, but also tens of thousands of others.

The web 2.0 may begin to fulfill the dream of Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web in 1990, and wrote in April 1998 in an essay: "The dream behind the web is of a common information s.p.a.ce in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished." ("The World Wide Web: A very short personal history", available on his webpage on the W3C website)

The first blog was launched in 1997. A blog is an online diary kept by a person or a group, usually in reverse chronological order, and can be updated every minute or once a month. There were 14 million blogs worldwide in July 2005, with 80,000 new blogs per day. According to Technorati, the first blog search engine, there were 65 million blogs in December 2006, with 175,000 new blogs per day. Some blogs are devoted to photos (photoblogs), music (audioblogs or podcasts), and videos (vlogs or videoblogs).

The wiki concept became quite popular in 2000. Deriving from the Hawaiian term "wiki" ("fast"), a wiki is a website allowing multiple users to collaborate online on the same project. Users can contribute to drafting content, editing it, improving it, and updating it. The software can be simple or more elaborate. A simple program handles text and hyperlinks. With a more elaborate program, one can embed images, charts, tables, etc. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia.

Facebook was founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow students as a social network. Originally created for the students of Harvard University, it was then available to students from any university in the U.S. before being open to anyone worldwide in September 2006, to connect with relatives, friends and strangers.

Facebook was the second most visited website after Google, with 500 million users in June 2010, while sparking debates on privacy issues.

Founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone, Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging tool to send free short messages of 140 characters maximum, called tweets, via the internet, IM or SMS.

Sometimes described as the SMS of the internet, Twitter gained worldwide popularity, with 106 million users in April 2010, and 300,000 new users per day. As for tweets, there were 5,000 per day in 2007, 300,000 in 2008, 2.5 million in 2009, 50 million in January 2010, and 55 million in April 2010, with the archiving of public tweets by the Library of Congress as a reflection of the trends of our time.

We now try to fullfill the second part of Tim Berners-Lee's dream, according to his essay dated April 1998: "There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was online, we could then use computers to help us a.n.a.lyze it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together."

2005 > FROM PDAS TO SMARTPHONES

[Summary]

In April 2001, there were 17 million PDAs versus 100,000 ebook readers worldwide, according to a Seybold Report available online. The Palm Pilot was launched as the first PDA in March 1996, with 23 million Palm Pilots sold between 1996 and 2002. Palm stayed the leader -- 36.8% of PDAs were Palm Pilots in 2002 -- despite a fierce compet.i.tion from Microsoft's Pocket PC and the PDAs of Hewlett-Packard, Sony, Handspring, Toshiba and Casio. The main platforms were Palm OS (for 55% of PDAs) and Pocket PC (for 25,7% of PDAs). People reading on PDAs could read on Mobipocket Reader (available in March 2000), Microsoft Reader (April 2000), Palm Reader (March 2001), Acrobat Reader (May 2001 for Palm Pilot, and December 2001 for Pocket PC), and finally Adobe Reader (May 2003), that replaced Acrobat Reader to read both standard PDF files and secure PDF files of copyrighted books. PDAs were then replaced by smartphones, from the Nokia 9210 in 2001 to the iPhone in April 2007.

In April 2001, there were 17 million PDAs versus 100,000 ebook readers worldwide, according to a Seybold Report available online. In 2005, PDAs were replaced with smartphones.

# The Palm Pilot

The Palm Pilot was launched as the first PDA in March 1996, with 23 million Palm Pilots sold between 1996 and 2002. In July 2002, the Palm Reader was also available for computers, and Palm Digital Media, Palm's digital bookstore (later renamed Palm eBook Store), was offering 5,500 ebooks in several languages. 10,000 ebooks were available in 2003.

Some book professionals were worried about reading on such a small screen, whereas PDA users found that the screen size wasn't a problem at all to read a good book on a pocket-size multifunction device.

# The eBookMan

Franklin's eBookMan was a handheld device to read books on the Franklin Reader, with standard PDA functions (calendar, voice recorder, etc.).

In October 2000, the device received the eBook Technology Award at the International Book Fair in Frankfurt, Germany. Three models (EBM-900, EBM-901, EBM-911) were available in early 2001, with a RAM size of 8 or 16 MB, and a backlit or not LCD screen. The screen was large compared to other handheld devices, but only in black and white, unlike the Pocket PC and some Palm Pilots. People could also listen to audiobooks and MP3 music files. In October 2001, the eBookMan offered the Mobipocket Reader alongside the Franklin Reader, and the Franklin Reader was also available for the Pocket PC and for models from Psion, Palm and Nokia. Franklin developed a digital bookstore while partnering with other companies, for example with Audible.com to access its collection of 4,500 audiobooks.

# Other PDAs

Palm stayed the leader 36.8% of PDAs were Palm Pilots in 2002 -- despite a fierce compet.i.tion from Microsoft's Pocket PC and from the PDAs of Hewlett-Packard, Sony, Handspring, Toshiba and Casio. The main platforms were Palm OS (for 55% of PDAs) and Pocket PC (for 25,7% of PDAs).

People reading on their PDAs could use Mobipocket Reader (available since March 2000), Microsoft Reader (April 2000), Palm Reader (March 2001), Acrobat Reader (May 2001 for Palm Pilot, and December 2001 for Pocket PC), and finally Adobe Reader (May 2003) that replaced Acrobat Reader to read both standard PDF files and secure PDF files of copyrighted books.

Publishers began to digitize their books and sell digital versions online in various formats (LIT, PRC, PDF, OeB), on their own websites or in the digital bookstores of Amazon, Barnes & n.o.ble, Palm, Mobipocket, Numilog, and the likes.

# Smartphones

In 2004, prices of PDAs began to drop, with the leaders still being Palm, Sony and Hewlett-Packard. People began buying smartphones instead of PDAs. The first smartphone was Nokia 9210, launched as early as 2001 with a Symbian platform , and followed by Nokia Series 60, Sony Ericsson P800, and the smartphones of Motorola and Siemens. Sony stopping selling PDAs in February 2005. 3,7% of cellphones sold in 2004 were smartphones. 9% of cellphones sold in 2006 were smartphones, with 90 million smartphones sold for one billion cell phones. Apple launched the iPhone in June 2007 in the U.S., in late 2007 in Europe and in 2008 in Asia.

Would people prefer reading on mobile handsets like the iPhone 3G (with its Stanza Reader) or the T-Mobile G1 (with Google's platform Android and its reader), or would they prefer using ebook readers? Was there a market for both smartphones and ebook readers? These were some of the fascinating issues discussed at the time.

2005 > FROM GOOGLE PRINT TO GOOGLE BOOKS