eBooks
A Brief History of the eBook
The
earliest mentioning of eBooks appears to be in science fiction books with Robert
A. Heinlein’s 1948 Space Cadet. In the book students used information
“spools” which are displayed with projectors on their study desks. EBooks
continue as a theme through to Charles Sheffield and Jerry Pournelle’s 1996
Higher Education, in which students use readers with optional voice output
and variable video display. EBooks have been a part of science fiction for
years, and now they are also a part of science fact. The first real eBooks were
created when people began using electronic resources such as word processors to
create and store information. They were shared after the Department Of
Defense’s 1969 creation of ARPAnet, which is noted as the beginning of the
internet when computer systems were linked together into communication networks.
In 1971 Michael Heart created Project Gutenberg
with the purpose of freely
releasing public domain books through the internet. Currently Project Gutenberg
has over 6200 books available for free download, and has mirror sites located
all over the world. In a 2002 interview Project Gutenberg director Michael Heart
stated that from just one Project Gutenberg site, over a million eBooks were
downloaded in a month’s time. In 1998 the U. S. National Institute of Standards
and Technology (NIST) held the first
International Electronic Book Workshop in
Gaithersburg, Maryland and eBooks as books had come into their own. One of the
big issues that were discussed at the International Electronic Book Workshop was
eBook format. Format is still in contention today, as evidenced by the number of
formats that are in use. Currently the Internet Public Library, which is an
educational initiative from the University of Michigan’s School of Information,
claims to have links to over 20,000 eBooks that can be read and downloaded for
free.
Unfortunately, while eBook availability has been growing,
awareness by teachers and use by students have not grown. Hopefully adoption of
eBooks in educational situations will not take as long as another great change,
it took over 300 years for movable type printed books showed up in schools (Lockard
1997). The electronic or digital “books” are available, the tools are in the
schools and in the students’ homes, and it is time to start incorporating eBooks
into education.
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eBooks in
Education
