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Ebook Ownership

OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF EBOOK

Suprisingly, E-books are not a new idea. The idea can be traced back to the 1930s, in which the writer Bob Brown, wrote a manifesto advocating for 'readies'. In this he imagines a portable, electronic device that can hold hundreds of books.

The invention of ebooks is credited to Michael S. Hart who used Arpanet and a mainframe computer to create digital text of various books and pamphlet, launching Project Gutenburg.

Bibliobytes, a website for free and for sale ebook distribution was created in 1993. HTML became the not only the main language of the web but also e-books. E-Ink, the display technology used to this day in e-readers like the Nook, Kobo, and Kindle, was invented in 1996 and commercialized in 1997.

The first website for distributing e-books developed in 1993, with the first e-reader coming out in 1998. The issue of a lack of standardization appeared in this era, with publishers needing to make different versions of books to function with each different e-reader platform. By 1999, there was a standard format created (EPUB) Though Amazon did not go along with this standardization with the Kindle
IN 2007 AMAZON LAUNCHED THE KINDLE

Currently Amazon one of the largest distributors of E-books and e-readers, though Apple Books and Google Books are also relevant.

"The Kindle was based on a proprietary format: Mobipocket, which Amazon had acquired rather than reinventing e-reader software. For many years, as the other e-readers evolved to support EPUB (or went out of business), publishers still had to provide two different formats for their e-books: the Kindle format for Amazon and EPUB for everybody else."(Kasdorf 2022)

With the creation of e-books, questions of ownership and the rights of an “owner” of an e-book started to come into question.

There needed (and perhaps still needs) to be an understanding of what ownership means regarding e-books, and what rights owners of e-books have in comparison to owners of physical books.

This issue is relevant not just for e-books, but all digital content like music and video games.

There needs to be an understanding of what ownership means regarding e-books, and what rights owners of e-books have in comparison to owners of physical books, especially for consumers.

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