On December 1, 1971 Project Gutenberg was started by Michael S. Hart. The main aim of the Project Gutenberg is to encourage encourage the creation and distribution of ebooks. Project Gutenberg is one of the oldest digital libraries. Most of the books in Project Gutenberg are of public domain … Meaning they are not copy protected and can be distributed freely. The books available be also in open format which will run on any computer. The books are mostly english and in plain text format, it also provides books in other format such as HTML, PDF, EPUB, MOBI and Plucker (I’ll explain these formats in later). Project Gutenberg currently adds fifty new ebooks every week.

In 1985, Robert Stein started Voyager Company, which had ebooks in CD-ROMs. In 1993, a person named Z.K.Zapata created the very first ebook reader software called Digital Book V.1. In the same year Digital Book Inc. offered 50 books in Digital Book Format in a floppy. In 1995, Amazon started to sell books (paper based books) on internet. In 1998 two ebook readers Rocket ebook and Softbook where launched. In 1999 many websites like eReader.com and eReads.com poped up. In 2000, “Riding the Bullet” by Stephen King was offered as ebook. In 2005 Amazon (sadly) bought Mobipocket (I’ll tell you the reason later). In 2006 Sony introduced their very own ebook reader named Sony Reader. In 2007 Kindle was launched in US by Amazon. In 2008 Adobe and Sony made an agreement to share their technologies. Kindle 2 was launched in 2008 (again only in US) and in 2009 Kindle DX (the big brother) was launched. Recently Kindle 2 was “allowed” to be sold outside US.