e material,
but I don't see how paper can possibly compete once people each
find their own comfortable way to etexts, especially in
schools."

John Mark Ockerbloom created the Online Books Page in 1993. He
wrote in 1998: "I've gotten very interested in the great
potential the net has for making literature available to a wide
audience. (...) I am very excited about the potential of the
internet as a mass communication medium in the coming years.
I'd also like to stay involved, one way or another, in making
books available to a wide audience for free via the net,
whether I make this explicitly part of my professional career,
or whether I just do it as a spare-time volunteer."

Ten years later, Peter Schweitzer, inventor of the @folio
project, the prototype of a reading device, wrote in an email
interview: "The luck we all have is to live here and now this
fantastic change. When I was born in 1963, computers didn't
have much memory. Today, my music player could hold billions of
pages, a true local library. Tomorrow, by the combined effect
of the Moore Law and the ubiquity of networks, we will have
instant access to works and knowledge. We won't be much
interested any more on which device to store information. We
will be interested in handy functions and beautiful objects."

Marc Autret, a journalist and graphic designer, wrote around
the same time: "I am convinced that the ebook (or "e-book") has
a great future in all non-fiction sectors. I refer to the ebook
as a software and not as a dedicated physical medium (the
conjecture is more uncertain on this point). The [European]
publishers of guides, encyclopedias and informative books in
general still see the ebook as a very minor variation of the
printed book, probably because the business model and secure
management don't seem entirely stabilized. But this is a matter
of time. Non-commercial ebooks are already emerging everywhere
while opening the way to new developments. To my eyes, there
are at least two emerging trends: (a) an increasingly
attractive and functional interface for reading/consultation
(navigation, research, restructuring on the fly, user
annotations, interactive quiz); (b) a multimedia integration
(video, sound, animated graphics, database) now strongly
coupled to the web. No physical book offers such features. So I
imagine the ebook of the future as a kind of wiki crystallized
and packaged in a format. How valuable will it be? Its value
will be t