Electronic publishing – History of Digital Publishing – The Beginnings of Digitization

E-reader on a pile of books, Credit: Martouf/Wikimedia, Public domain

Digital publishing or electronic publishing is the process by which content is produced, formatted, and disseminated in digital environments (online or offline) for reading on screens (computers, e-readers, tablets, smartphones).

History of Digital Publishing

Digital publishing must be understood within a historical continuum that includes the history of publishing, the history of information, and, more broadly, the history of ideas and their dissemination [1]. The idea of democratized thought, among other things, appears central to the history of digital publishing. Indeed, as explained in the book Practices of Digital Publishing, “closely linked to the history of ideas, the evolution of publishing, and even the very profession of the publisher, has historically accompanied a certain democratic ideal that is still its own today, but whose preservation nevertheless promises to be one of the most important challenges for the years to come [1].” According to Jean-Philippe Magué in Digital Publishing Practices, publishing is traditionally based on three bodies that are also its main tasks: the selection of content, the legitimization of this content, and its dissemination. [2] These three basic functions characterize both print and digital publishing.

Digital publishing encompasses any activity involving the design and formatting of digital content for dissemination using contemporary digital technologies.

The Beginnings of Digitization

According to Pierre Mounier and Marin Dacos, in 2010, the digitization of works belonging to the public domain constitutes “the oldest electronic publishing practice that can be found.”[3] The first digitization initiative originated in the United States in 1971 and was carried out by Michael Hart, then a student at the University of Illinois. He launched Project Gutenberg,[4] a universal project aimed at making literature available to a wide audience. The project grew slowly, and by 1989, barely ten texts had been entered digitally, and even then, only by Michael Hart and his volunteers using keyboards. However, with the arrival of the World Wide Web (WWW or 3W) in 1991, commonly referred to as Web 1.0, which aimed to connect documents together in the form of static pages, Project Gutenberg quickly gained momentum. Many volunteers then aided its development by contributing classic literary works that had fallen into the public domain. [5]

The basic principles of this project were to end ignorance by providing access to literature, not only to teachers and students, but especially to the general public. This marked the beginning of so-called public libraries. [6] The first book Hart seized in 1991 was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, published in 1865. With the arrival of the Mosaic browser in 1993, Project Gutenberg reached its hundredth book in 1994 with the publication of the complete works of Shakespeare. The project then touches on three main genres: entertainment literature (fairy tales and fables), so-called serious literature (the Bible and the great classics), and reference literature (dictionaries and encyclopedias). By 2018, the project had reached over 57,000 digital books available for free, for online reading or downloading, in various formats such as ePub, Kindle, iPad, Android, etc. Although most of the available works are in English, the project offers works in over 40 languages via the Project Gutenberg specific to each of the countries concerned. As the project is open source, thousands of volunteers participate, and it is possible to contribute by digitizing open-access books or recording them in audio. Starting in January 2019, several documents published in 1923, which had been prevented from entering the public domain for twenty years due to the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, will become freely available to the general public.

In the 1970s, the CNRS digitized approximately 1,000 works of various genres (mainly literary, but also philosophical and scientific), dating from the Middle Ages (1180s) to the present day, with the aim of providing a text bank for the creation of a large dictionary, the Trésor de la langue française. This text base called Frantext[7] was first distributed on CD under the name “Discotext”, then put on the Web in 1998. It has been constantly enriched since then and has 5,350 titles in 2018.

(Includes texts from Wikipedia translated and adapted by Nicolae Sfetcu)