While we are used to imagining the future of ebooks as something that came out of the 21st century, the truth is that the digital book has a long history.
It can trace its origins to a number of technological breakthroughs, but the most influential were Bibliobytes and the Internet. The invention of the internet made the eBook a reality and it was then that it began to take off.
Bob Brown’s Reading Machine
Brown was a literary, artistic, and popular impresario in the early twentieth century, churning out pulp fiction, populist cookbooks, and writing about everything from ethnography to movies. He was in the midst of virtually every significant American literary, artistic, political, and popular or countercultural movement of his time — from Chicago’s Cliff Dweller’s Club to Greenwich Village’s bohemians to New York City’s Imagist poets.
He was also a visionary who invented a reading machine more than seventy years ahead of the e-book. Bob Brown, a modernist expatriate who drew inspiration from the art and technology of his day, was obsessed with making books and reading more efficient and accessible. He conceived of a machine that would turn words into optic images by projecting them onto a movable tape that ran under a magnifying glass.
Unlike Duchamp’s toy-like machines, Brown’s machine was practical and commercial – it had an electric current, controls and regulators, and even a reel of film that held one continuous line of type. The idea was that by replacing the cut-up lines of a book with a single line on a roll of film, a reader would be able to read more quickly and easily.
His idea was a step in the direction of a more naturalistic and optical reading process, a new form of mediated literature that he and other writers were trying to create. He and the poets who contributed to Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine were writing with a specific audience in mind, and were challenging the traditional page as a unit of communication.
In a culture where reading is being increasingly challenged by the rise of tablet devices and e-books, his efforts to change the way we read have become hauntingly pertinent. His invention of a reading machine that he never really built has been revived as an important piece of literature in the history of ebooks.
When Brown’s envisioned reading machine was first published in 1931, his goal was to develop a system that would speed up the pace of reading literature by projecting text directly into a person’s eye. He had many supporters, including Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams, who helped him create the genre of readies. He also included arrows and dashes to encourage the mutual acceleration of machine and human perception.
Angela Ruiz Robles’ Mechanical Encyclopedia
Angela Ruiz Robles’ Mechanical Encyclopedia was a visionary forerunner to the modern ebook. It was a prototype of a device that kept text and images on reels that loaded onto rotating spindles.
The device would allow students to access information in any language. It also had multiple content reels that could be swapped out, allowing teachers to produce their own content for the device.
During her career as a teacher, she wanted to find a way to make learning more interactive and spark student imaginations. This led her to create the Mechanical Encyclopedia, which consisted of patterned sheets that lit up when touched and displayed an educational text. She patented the design in 1949 and it has since been part of the National Museum of Science and Technology in A Coruna, Spain.
She also envisioned a system that allowed students to change the text, images, and topics that they were reading, which she believed would increase their interest in the material. She also wanted to make the device portable and reduce the number of books that students needed to carry around.
While she never went into commercial production of the device, Ruiz Robles received a number of awards and recognitions for her inventions. Her first proposal was patented in 1949 and it was awarded the patent number 190,698.
Her second patent application in 1962 was for a simplified version of her original idea, eliminating all the mechanical or electrical buttons and making the device more compact and simple. It included a series of reels that presented learning materials, including audio, a magnifying glass and a light – plus different subject reels that could be changed out.
This was an early version of hypertext, where students would select items to read them and they’d highlight the correct information or additional information if necessary. It was an early version of an interactive book and it’s a great example of how women can overcome barriers to reach their full potential.
In honor of her contribution to education and innovation, a street in Madrid has been named after her. It’s a fantastic initiative that recognizes her work and brings previously overlooked women’s achievements to the forefront of history.
Roberto Busa’s Index Thomisticus
In the 1940s, before computers were small and slow, before the Internet was a thing, before it was possible to send a text file over the Internet, and before even the notion of digital technology permeated the academic community, an Italian Jesuit priest began to use computers to organize a massive work of Saint Thomas Aquinas. He called the project Index Thomisticus, and it was one of the first great projects in computer-assisted linguistic analysis.
During the six years that the project took to complete, Busa and his team of operators used IBM punched cards to process an enormous corpus of Latin texts into lemmatized concordances. They worked out of the Center for Automation and Literary Analysis in Gallarate, Italy.
Busa hoped that his machine-generated concordance would help scholars in the future locate words and phrases in a large body of text. He believed that this would be more efficient than manual searches, and he was right.
However, it was also a very expensive endeavor. It took an estimated 10,000 hours of computer work and 1 million hours of human labor to complete the Index Thomisticus.
Jones points out that this labor was a lot for a small team of men to do, especially considering that the project was completed only thirty years after Busa began it. This is especially notable given that he had been trained in philosophy at the Papal Gregorian University in Rome and was working on a philological approach to studying Aquinas.
As the project was being developed, Busa enlisted the support of several influential scholars in his field. These included Daniel L. McGloin, the chair of philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
He also asked for a letter of support from Pope Pius XII. He received a favorable response from both of these institutions.
During this period, many women also worked with Busa on his projects. He hired them as operators, and they were part of the teams that produced the Index Thomisticus. Although this type of gendered work is now rare in professional programming, Jones argues that it is important to recognize the formative capacity of these liminal moments when it comes to defining what computing can do for scholarly and corporate communities.
Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is a nonprofit, volunteer-driven organization that distributes free digital copies of books in the public domain. It’s different than other e-book projects in that it produces its texts from original sources rather than scans of existing print copies. This approach has a psychological impact that makes it feel more like a book than a Google Books scan: Gutenberg texts are created by people, not by machines.
The first e-book was produced in 1971, when Michael Hart, then an undergraduate student at the University of Illinois, typed the Declaration of Independence onto a Xerox Sigma 5 computer, and sent it to a few people via ARPANET. Hart had the idea that one day computers would be widely accessible, and he wanted to make works of literature available in electronic form for free.
Despite the fact that it was hard to make digital text files of books in the early days, Hart was determined to complete his goal. He eventually got help from volunteers and a better cataloging system to keep track of titles.
Today, Gutenberg has an incredible variety of digitized public domain books in its library. It’s also easy to search for a particular title or author with their Online Book Catalog tool, which is a great resource for discovering new books.
You can browse by author, language and other options. You can also search by subject, including history, biography and science. It’s a good place to start if you are looking for books to read or download.
Another way to find a specific book is to check out the “most downloaded” page on Project Gutenberg. This list is constantly updated, and shows how many downloads have been made of each book. You can see what is popular, and whether or not you should try to download it.
Regardless of the reason you want to download an ebook, it’s important to remember that most books are in the public domain and cannot be sold. They can be used for personal or educational use, and can be re-distributed without restriction. This is why the Project Gutenberg ethos is so important: it’s not about making money, it’s about spreading knowledge.