Marie Lebert

“ Adobe launched PDF (Portable Document Format) in June 1993, with Acrobat Reader (free, to read PDF documents) and Adobe Acrobat (for a fee, to create PDF documents) . As the "veteran" format, PDF was perfected over the years as a global standard for distribution and viewing of information. It "lets you capture and view robust information from any application, on any computer system and share it with anyone around the world. Individuals, businesses, and government agencies everywhere trust and rely on Adobe PDF to communicate their ideas and vision" (excerpt from the website) . ”

“ The development of the Digital Library will enable the British Library to embrace the digital information age. Digital technology will be used to preserve and extend the Library's unparalleled collection. Access to the collection will become boundless with users from all over the world, at any time, having simple, fast access to digitized materials using computer networks, particularly the internet. ”

“ September 1998 > A quote by Robert Beard, founder of A Web of Online
Dictionaries
Robert Beard, founder of A Web of Online Dictionaries in 1995, wrote in September 1998: "The web will be an encyclopedia of the world by the world for the world. There will be no information or knowledge that anyone needs that will not be available. The major hindrance to international and interpersonal understanding, personal and institutional enhancement, will be removed. It would take a wilder imagination than mine to predict the effect of this development on the nature of humankind." ”

“ More and more digital books are in ePub format, widely used by publishers to distribute their ebooks, because it is designed for reflowable content, meaning that the text display can be optimized for the particular display device used by the reader: computer with a large screen, ebook reader with a medium screen, and smartphone with a small screen. The format is meant to function as a single format that publishers and conversion houses can use in-house, as well as for distribution and sale. The PDF files created with recent versions of Adobe Acrobat are compatible with the ePub format. ”

“ Catherine, an avid traveler herself, started a website in early 1999, as a virtual travel in the field of computing, and wrote in November 2000: "My site is still pretty basic and under construction. Like my bookstore, it is a place to meet people before being a place of business. The internet is a pain in the neck, takes a lot of my time and I earn hardly any money, but that doesn't worry me... ”

“ Sometimes described as the SMS of the internet, Twitter has since 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 tweets by the Library of Congress as a reflection of the trends of our time, and their inclusion by Google in the results of its search engine. ”

“ When Project Gutenberg started in July 1971, the internet was just a glimmer, with a pre-internet set up in 1969. The internet took off in 1974 with the creation of the TCP/IP protocol by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn. It expanded as a network linking U.S. governmental agencies, universities and research centers. The internet got its first boost with the invention of the web by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990, and its second boost with the release of the first public browser Mosaic in 1993. ”

“ In December 1997, AltaVista was the first search engine to launch a free machine translation software called Babel Fish — or AltaVista Translation -, which could translate up to three pages from English into French, German, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish, and vice versa. The software was developed by SYSTRAN (acronym of "System Translation") , a company specializing in automated language solutions. Babel Fish was a hit among the 12 million internet users of the time, with more and more non-English-speaking users, and contributed to the plurilinguism of the web. ”

“ Since the mid-1990s, libraries were studying how to store an enormous amount of data, and make it available on the internet through a reliable search engine. Library 2000 was a project run between 1995 and 1998 by the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology) to explore the implications of large scale online storage, using the digital library of the future as an example. It developed a prototype using the technology and system configurations expected to be economically feasible in 2000. ”

“ 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, with a search engine and hyperlinks between articles. PLoS posted an open letter requesting the articles traditionally published in expensive 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. ”

“ Surfing the web is like radiating in all directions (I am interested in something and I click on all the links on a home page) or like jumping around (from one click to another, as the links appear) . You can do this in the written media, of course. But the difference is striking. So the internet changed how I write. You don't write the same way for a website as you do for a script or a play. (...) Since then I write directly on the screen: I use the print medium only occasionally (...) ”

“ A blog is an online diary kept by a person or a group. A blog usually is in reverse chronological order, an can be updated every minute or once per month. The first blog was launched in 1997. In July 2005, there were 14 million blogs worldwide, with 80,000 new blogs per day. Technorati, the first blog search engine, gave the number of 65 million blogs in December 2006, with 175,000 new blogs per day. ”

“ Eurodicautom was launched in 1997 as a free website by the Translation Service of the European Commission. Eurodicautom was a multilingual terminology database of economic, scientific, technical, and legal terms and expressions, with language pairs for the eleven official languages of the European Union (Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish) , and Latin, and with an average of 120,000 hits per day in 2003. ”

“ The project started in October 2005 as a group of cultural, technology, non profit, and governmental organizations gathering around the Internet Archive to digitize public domain books around the world. The first 100,000 ebooks were available in December 2006 in the Text Archive of the Internet Archive, with 12,000 new ebooks posted per month. Unlike Google Books, the Open Content Alliance (OCA) has made them searchable through any web search engine, and has not scanned copyrighted books, except when the copyright holder has expressly given permission. ”

“ In late 1999, the Internet Archive started to include collections of archived webpages on specific topics. It also became an online digital library of text, audio, software, image and video content. In October 2001, with 30 billion stored webpages, the Internet Archive launched the Wayback Machine, for users to be able to surf the archive of the web by date. In 2004, there were 300 terabytes of data, with a growth of 12 terabytes per month. ”

“ I've gotten very interested in the great potential the net has for making literature available to a wide audience. (...) I am very excited about the potential of the internet as a mass communication medium in the coming years. ”

“ In 1995, the MIT Press was publishing 200 new books per year and 40 journals, in science and technology, architecture, social theory, economics, cognitive science, and computational science. The MIT Press decided to put a number of books online for free, as "a long-term commitment to the efficient and creative use of new technologies". ”

“ Previously distinct information-based industries, such as printing, publishing, graphic design, media, sound recording and film making, were converging into one industry, with information as a common product. ”

“ In February 2003, the association Handicapzéro launched a general portal for visually impaired French-speaking internet users, offering free access to national and international news, sports news, TV programs, the weather forecast, and access to a full range of services for health, employment, consumer goods, leisure time, sports, and telephony. Handicapzéro — founded in 1987 - has aimed to improve the autonomy of visually impaired people in the French-speaking world, that is to say around 10% of the population. ”

“ Founded in 1997, NuvoMedia wanted to become "the electronic book distribution solution, by providing a networking infrastructure for publishers, retailers and end users to publish, distribute, purchase and read electronic content securely and efficiently on the internet." NuvoMedia's investors were Barnes & Noble and Bertelsmann. The connection between the Rocket eBook and the computer (PC or Macintosh) was made through the Rocket eBook Cradle, which provided power through a wall transformer, and connected to the computer with a serial cable. ”

“ In November 2010, the website of Barnes & Noble offered 2 million ebooks for the Nook.
April 2010 > The iPad, a multifunctional tablet launched by Apple
In April 2010, Apple launched the iPad, its multifunctional tablet, in the U.S. for US$499, with an iBookstore of 60,000 ebooks, and many more to come from partnerships with publishers. The iPad was available in a few European countries in June 2010. After the iPod (launched in October 2001) and the iPhone (launched in January 2007) , two cult devices for a whole generation, Apple has also become a key player for digital books. ”

“ Amazon.com started its eBookStore in November 2000, following a partnership with Microsoft in August 2000 to sell digital books for the Microsoft Reader. The same month, Amazon.com also partnered with Adobe to offer digital books for the Acrobat Reader and the Glassbook Reader - Adobe had just bought Glassbook, its reader and its digital bookstore. In April 2001, Amazon.com partnered again with Adobe to include in its collection 2,000 copyrighted books for the Acrobat eBook Reader, mainly titles from major publishers, travel guides, and children books. ”

“ As explained on the project's website in September 1998: "The Internet Dictionary Project's goal is to create royalty-free translating dictionaries through the help of the internet's citizens. This site allows individuals from all over the world to visit and assist in the translation of English words into other languages. ”

“ Digitalization has made it possible to create, record, manipulate, combine, store, retrieve and transmit information and information-based products in ways which magnetic tape, celluloid and paper did not permit. ”

“ Its multilingual content is free and written collaboratively by people worldwide, who contribute under a pseudonym. Its website is a wiki, which means that anyone can edit, correct, and improve information throughout the encyclopedia. The articles stay the property of their authors, and can be freely used according to the GFDL (GNU Free Documentation License) and the Creative Commons license. In December 2004, Wikipedia had 1.3 million articles (by 13,000 contributors) in 100 languages. In December 2006, Wikipedia was among the ten top sites on the web, with 6 million articles. ”

“ January 2001 > The Cybook was launched as the first European ebook reader
Developed by Cytale, a French company created by Olivier Pujol, the Cybook (21 x 16 cm, 1 kilo) was available in January 2001 as the first European ebook reading device. Its memory - 32 M of SDRAM and 16 M of flash memory - could store 15.000 pages, or 30 books of 500 pages. ”

“ In September 2000, Numilog launched an online bookstore that became the main French- language aggregator of digital books. In December 2006, the catalog included 35,000 books and audiobooks from 60 publishers, including Gallimard, POL, Le Dilettante, Le Rocher, La Découverte, De Vive Voix, Eyrolles or Pearson Education France. Numilog is now (since May 2008) a subsidiary of Hachette Livre, a leading publishing group. In January 2009, the catalog was offering 100,000 ebooks from 100 publishers, with tailored services for bookstores and libraries. ”

“ An external electrical pulse makes the balls rotate and change color, to display, modify, or delete data. In 2004, the market was commercial advertising, with small posters running on batteries. The company ended its activities in 2005, with R&D activities going on at Xerox.
2000 > The wiki, a collaborative website
Deriving from the Hawaiian term "wiki" ("fast") , a wiki is a website allowing multiple users to collaborate online on the same project. The wiki concept became quite popular in 2000. At any time, users can contribute to drafting content, edit it, improving it, and updating it. ”

“ In April 2001, there were 17 million PDAs and only 100,000 ebook readers worldwide, according to a Seybold Report. 13,2 million PDAs were sold in 2001. Palm was the leader, despite fierce competition, with 23 million Palm Pilots sold between 1996 and 2002. In 2002, 36.8% of all PDAs were Palm Pilots. The Palm Pilot's main competitor was Microsoft's Pocket PC. The main platforms were Palm OS (for 55% PDAs) and Pocket PC (for 25,7% PDAs) . In 2004, prices began to drop. The leaders were the PDAs of Palm, Sony, and Hewlett-Packard, followed by Handspring, Toshiba, and Casio. ”

“ April 2010 > A quote by Catherine Domain, bookseller and publisher of travel books
Catherine Domain, founder in 1971 of the Ulysses bookstore, the oldest travel bookstore in the world, has become a publisher of travel books in April 2010. She wrote in an email: "The internet has taken more and more space in my life! ”