wledge of the
time, the Encyclopedie was a reflection of the intellectual and social
currents of the time, called the Age of Enlightenment, and contributed
to disseminate novel ideas that would inspire the French Revolution in
1789.

April 1998 > The dream behind the web

In a short essay posted on his webpage, Tim Berners-Lee, who invented
the web in 1990, wrote in May 1998: "The dream behind the web is of a
common information space in which we communicate by sharing
information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext
link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it
draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too,
dependent on the web being so generally used that it became a realistic
mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work
and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our
interactions was online, we could then use computers to help us analyze
it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and
how we can better work together" (excerpt from: The World Wide Web: A
very short personal history, available on the W3C website).

May 1998 > Editions 00h00, a pioneer in online publishing

Editions 00h00 (pronounced "zero heure") was created in May 1998 by
Jean-Pierre Arbon and Bruno de Sa Moreira, as a pioneer in commercial
online publishing, to sell digital books through the internet. In 2000,
the catalog included 600 titles, with 85% of sales for digital versions
(in PDF format), and the remaining 15% for on-demand print versions. No
stock, but a direct link with the reader and between readers. On the
website, users/readers could create their personal space to write their
comments, participate in forums, subscribe to an online newsletter, and
watch online video clips about new literary works that were published.
In September 2000, 00h00 was bought by the media company Gemstar.
Gemstar put an end to its eBook experiments in June 2003.

August 1998 > Quote from Michael Hart

Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg in 1971, and the inventor of
ebooks, has dedicated his whole life to put as many literary works
online for free for everyone. He wrote in August 1998: "We consider
etext to be a new medium, with no real relationship to paper, other
than presenting the same material, but I don't see how paper can
possibly compete once people each find their own comfortable way to
etexts, especially in schools"