le first launched
its America OnLine (AOL) website in March 1997--as the exclusive
bookseller for the 12 million AOL customers--, before launching its own
website, barnesandnoble.com, in May 1997. The site was offering reviews
from authors and publishers, with a catalog of 630,000 titles available
for immediate shipping, and significant discounts: 30% off all in-stock
hardcovers, 20% off all in-stock paperbacks, 40% off select titles, and
up to 90% off bargain books. Its Affiliate Network spread quickly, with
12,000 affiliate websites in May 1998, including CNN Interactive, Lycos
and ZDNet.

June 1997 > 82.3% English-speaking internet users

The percentage of English-speaking internet users decreased from nearly
100% in 1983 to 82.3% in June 1997. People from all over the world
began to have access to the internet, and to post more and more
webpages in their own languages. The first major study about language
distribution on the web was run by Babel, a joint initiative from Alis
Technologies, a company specializing in language translation services,
and the Internet Society. The results were published in June 1997 on a
webpage named Web Languages Hit Parade. The main languages were English
with 82.3%, German with 4.0%, Japanese with 1.6%, French with 1.5%,
Spanish with 1.1%, Swedish with 1.1%, and Italian with 1.0%.

1997 > The digitization of print books

In 1997, a digital book meant scanning it, because most books existed
only in print. To be viewed on the screen, a digitized book could be in
text format or image format. The text format meant scanning the book to
get image files, then converting these image files into text files
using some OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software, and then if
possible correcting the text on the screen by comparing both versions,
because a good OCR software was said to be reliable at 90%, leaving a
few errors per page. The text version of the book did not retain the
original layout of the book or page. The image format was the
photograph of the book page by page, as the digital facsimile of the
printed version. The original layout was preserved, and one could leaf
through the book page after page on the screen. Much cheaper to
produce, the image format didn't allow a full-text search in the book,
a major set back for an electronic book.

1997 > The Library 2000 project

Since the mid-1990s, libraries were studying how to store an enormous
amount of data and make it available