ology improvements for content aggregators, mash-up,
wikis, and large scale content management.

As a consortium of the ten largest life science libraries, the
Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) started the digitization of
2 million documents from public domain spanning over 200 years.
In May 2007, when the project was officially launched, 1.25
million pages were already digitized in London, Boston and
Washington DC, and available in the Text Archive section of the
Internet Archive.

The Encyclopedia of Life is built on the work of thousands of
experts around the globe, in a moderated wiki-style
environment, for the general public to be able to contribute.
The first pages were available in mid-2008. The encyclopedia
should be fully "operational" in 2012 and completed with all
known species in 2017. The English version will be translated
in several languages by partner organizations. People will be
able to use the encyclopedia as a "macroscope" to identify
major trends from a considerable stock of information - in the
same way they use a microscope for the study of detail.

2003: EBOOKS ARE SOLD WORLDWIDE

= [Overview]

First, publishers began to sell digital versions of their books
online, on their own websites or on the new eBookstores of
Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com. In 2000, new online
bookstores were created to sell "only" digital books (ebooks),
like Palm Digital Media (renamed Palm eBook Store), Mobipocket
or Numilog. At the same time, publishers were digitizing their
books by the hundreds, while the public was getting used to
read ebooks on computers, laptops, phones, smartphones and
reading devices. 2003 was a turning point in an emerging
market. More and more books were published simultaneously as a
print book and a digital book, and thousands of new books,
beginning with best-sellers, were sold as ebooks in various
formats: PDF (to be read on Acrobat Reader, replaced by Adobe
Reader), LIT (to be read on Microsoft Reader), PRC (to be read
on Mobipocket Reader) and others, with the Open eBook format
becoming a standard for ebooks.

= Books, from print to digital

The new online bookstores selling "only" digital books were
also called aggregators because they were producing and selling
ebooks from many publishers. It took them a few years (at least
in Europe) to convince publishers that books should have two
versions, print and digital, and to wait for the public to be
ready to read on