The Ebook Turned 50 on July 4, 2021

“On July 4, 1971, Michael Hart made the text of the Declaration of Independence available on arpanet (which is now the Internet), using the gopher protocol (look it up). Although books in digital form certainly existed before that, many of us regard the beginning of Project Gutenberg as the birth of the ebook. There were computer-readable books on magnetic disks, punch cards and the like, but the revolutionary element of Project Gutenberg was the distribution method. Printed books, after all, are a digital media, it just that the bits are embodied by the presence or absence of ink rather than electrons on a transistor gate. Sending the bits over a wire or a fiber is what puts the ‘e’ in ebook.”