The Readies (1930) Some trace the concept of an e-reader, a device that would enable the user to view books on a screen, to a 1930 manifesto by
Bob Brown, written after watching his first "
talkie" (movie with sound). He titled it
The Readies, playing off the idea of the "talkie". In his book, Brown says movies have outmaneuvered the book by creating the "talkies" and, as a result, reading should find a new medium: Brown's notion, however, was much more focused on reforming
orthography and vocabulary, than on medium. He says: "It is time to pull out the stopper" and begin "a bloody revolution of the word," introducing huge numbers of
portmanteau symbols to replace normal words, and punctuation to simulate action or movement, so it is not clear whether this fits into the history of "e-books" or not. Later e-readers never followed a model at all like Brown's. However, he correctly predicted the miniaturization and portability of e-readers. In an article, Jennifer Schuessler writes: "The machine, Brown argued, would allow readers to adjust the type size, avoid paper cuts and save trees, all while hastening the day when words could be 'recorded directly on the palpitating ether.'" Brown believed that the e-reader (and his notions for changing the text itself) would bring a completely new life to reading. Schuessler correlates it with a
DJ spinning bits of old songs to create a beat or an entirely new song, as opposed to just a remix of a familiar song.
Inventor The inventor of the first e-book is not widely agreed upon. Some notable candidates include the following:
Roberto Busa (1946–1970) The first e-book may be the
Index Thomisticus, a heavily annotated electronic index to the works of
Thomas Aquinas, prepared by
Roberto Busa, S.J. beginning in 1946 and completed in the 1970s. Although originally stored on a single computer, a distributable
CD-ROM version appeared in 1989. However, this work is sometimes omitted. Maybe this is because the digitized text was a means for studying written texts and developing linguistic concordances, rather than as a published edition in its own right. In 2005, the Index was published online.
Ángela Ruiz Robles (1949) In 1949,
Ángela Ruiz Robles, a teacher from
Ferrol, Spain, patented the
Enciclopedia Mecánica, or the Mechanical Encyclopedia, a mechanical device which operated on compressed air where text and graphics were contained on spools that users would load onto rotating spindles. Her idea was to create a device which would decrease the number of books that her pupils carried to school. The final device was planned to include audio recordings, a magnifying glass, a calculator, and an electric light for night reading. Her device was never put into production but a prototype is on display at the
National Museum of Science and Technology in
A Coruña.
Douglas Engelbart and Andries van Dam (1960s) Alternatively, some historians consider electronic books to have started in the early 1960s, with the
NLS project headed by
Douglas Engelbart at
Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and the
Hypertext Editing System and
FRESS projects headed by
Andries van Dam at
Brown University. FRESS documents ran on IBM main frames and were structure-oriented rather than line-oriented. They were formatted dynamically for different users, display hardware, window sizes, and so on, as well as having automated tables of contents, indexes, and so on. All these systems also provided extensive
hyperlinking, graphics, and other capabilities. Van Dam is generally thought to have coined the term "electronic book", and it was established enough to use in an article title by 1985. FRESS was used for reading extensive primary texts online, as well as for annotation and online discussions in several courses, including English Poetry and Biochemistry. Brown's faculty made extensive use of FRESS. For example the philosopher
Roderick Chisholm used it to produce several of his books. Thus in the Preface to
Person and Object (1979) he writes: "The book would not have been completed without the epoch-making File Retrieval and Editing System..." Brown University's work in electronic book systems continued for many years, including
US Navy funded projects for electronic repair-manuals; a large-scale distributed hypermedia system known as InterMedia; a spinoff company Electronic Book Technologies that built
DynaText, the first
SGML-based e-reader system; and the Scholarly Technology Group's extensive work on the
Open eBook standard.
Michael S. Hart (1971) Despite the extensive earlier history, several publications report
Michael S. Hart as the inventor of the e-book. In 1971, the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the
University of Illinois gave Hart extensive computer time. Seeking a worthy use of this resource, he created his first electronic document by typing the
United States Declaration of Independence into a computer in plain text. Hart planned to create documents using plain text to make them as easy as possible to download and view on devices. After Hart first adapted the U.S. Declaration of Independence into an electronic document in 1971,
Project Gutenberg was launched to create electronic copies of more texts, especially books. In 1980, the
U.S. Department of Defense began a concept development for a portable electronic delivery device for technical maintenance information called project PEAM, the Portable Electronic Aid for Maintenance. Detailed specifications were completed in
FY 1981/82, and prototype development began with
Texas Instruments that same year. Four prototypes were produced and delivered for testing in 1986, and tests were completed in 1987. The final summary report was produced in 1989 by the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, authored by Robert Wisher and
J. Peter Kincaid. A patent application for the PEAM device, titled "Apparatus for delivering procedural type instructions", was submitted by Texas Instruments on December 4, 1985, listing John K. Harkins and Stephen H. Morriss as inventors. In 1992,
Sony launched the
Data Discman, an electronic book reader that could read e-books that were stored on CDs. One of the electronic publications that could be played on the Data Discman was called
Library of the Future. Early e-books were generally written for specialty areas and a limited audience, meant to be read only by small and devoted interest groups. The scope of the subject matter of these e-books included technical manuals for hardware, manufacturing techniques, and other subjects. In the 1990s, the general availability of the
Internet made transferring electronic files much easier, including e-books. In 1993, Paul Baim released a freeware
HyperCard stack, called EBook, that allowed easy import of any text file to create a pageable version similar to an electronic paperback book. A notable feature was automatic tracking of the last page read so that on returning to the 'book' you were taken back to where you had previously left off reading. The title of this stack may have helped popularize the term 'ebook'.
E-book formats As e-book formats emerged and proliferated, some garnered support from major software companies, such as
Adobe with its
PDF format that was introduced in 1993. Unlike most other formats, PDF documents are generally tied to a particular dimension and layout, rather than adjusting dynamically to the current page, window, or another size. Different e-reader devices followed different formats, most of them accepting books in only one or a few formats, thereby fragmenting the e-book market even more. Due to the exclusiveness and limited readerships of e-books, the fractured market of independent publishers and specialty authors lacked consensus regarding a standard for packaging and selling e-books. Meanwhile, scholars formed the
Text Encoding Initiative, which developed consensus guidelines for encoding books and other materials of scholarly interest for a variety of analytic uses as well as reading. Countless literary and other works have been developed using the TEI approach. In the late 1990s, a consortium formed to develop the
Open eBook format as a way for authors and publishers to provide a single source-document which many book-reading software and hardware platforms could handle. Several scholars from the TEI were closely involved in the early development of
Open eBook, including
Allen Renear,
Elli Mylonas, and
Steven DeRose, all from Brown. Focused on portability, Open eBook as defined required subsets of
XHTML and
CSS; a set of multimedia formats (others could be used, but there must also be a fallback in one of the required formats), and an
XML schema for a "manifest", to list the components of a given e-book, identify a table of contents, cover art, and so on. This format led to the open format
EPUB.
Google Books has converted many
public domain works to this open format. In 2010, e-books continued to gain in their own specialist and underground markets. Many e-book publishers began distributing books that were in the
public domain. At the same time, authors with books that were not accepted by publishers offered their works online so they could be seen by others. Unofficial (and occasionally unauthorized) catalogs of books became available on the web, and sites devoted to e-books began disseminating information about e-books to the public. Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. Consumer e-book publishing market are controlled by the "Big Five". The "Big Five" publishers are:
Hachette,
HarperCollins,
Macmillan,
Penguin Random House and
Simon & Schuster.
Libraries U.S. libraries began to offer free e-books to the public in 1998 through their websites and associated services, although the e-books were primarily scholarly, technical, or professional in nature, and could not be downloaded. In 2003, libraries began offering free downloadable popular fiction and non-fiction e-books to the public, launching an
e-book lending model that worked much more successfully for public libraries. The number of library e-book distributors and lending models continued to increase over the next few years. From 2005 to 2008, libraries experienced a 60% growth in e-book collections. In 2010, a Public Library Funding and Technology Access Study by the
American Library Association found that 66% of public libraries in the U.S. were offering e-books, and a large movement in the library industry began to seriously examine the issues relating to e-book lending, acknowledging a "
tipping point" when e-book technology would become widely established. Content from public libraries can be downloaded to e-readers using
application software like
Overdrive and
Hoopla. The
U.S. National Library of Medicine has for many years provided
PubMed, a comprehensive bibliography of medical literature. In early 2000, NLM set up the
PubMed Central repository, which stores full-text e-book versions of many medical journal articles and books, through co-operation with scholars and publishers in the field. Pubmed Central also now provides archiving and access to over 4.1 million articles, maintained in a standard
XML format known as the
Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS). Despite the widespread adoption of e-books, some publishers and authors have not endorsed the concept of
electronic publishing, citing issues with user demand,
copyright infringement and challenges with proprietary devices and systems. In a survey of
interlibrary loan (ILL) librarians, it was found that 92% of libraries held e-books in their collections and that 27% of those libraries had negotiated ILL rights for some of their e-books. This survey found significant barriers to conducting interlibrary loan for e-books.
Patron-driven acquisition (PDA) has been available for several years in public libraries, allowing vendors to streamline the acquisition process by offering to match a library's selection profile to the vendor's e-book titles. The library's catalog is then populated with records for all of the e-books that match the profile. The decision to purchase the title is left to the patrons, although the library can set purchasing conditions such as a maximum price and purchasing caps so that the dedicated funds are spent according to the library's budget. The 2012 meeting of the
Association of American University Presses included a panel on the PDA of books produced by university presses, based on a preliminary report by Joseph Esposito, a digital publishing consultant who has studied the implications of PDA with a grant from the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Challenges Although the demand for e-book services in libraries has grown in the first two decades of the 21st century, difficulties keep libraries from providing some e-books to clients. Publishers will sell e-books to libraries, but in most cases they will only give libraries a limited license to the title, meaning that the library does not
own the electronic text but is allowed to circulate it for either a certain period of time, or a certain number of check outs, or both. When a library purchases an e-book license, the cost is at least three times what it would be for a personal consumer. E-book licenses are more expensive than paper-format editions because publishers are concerned that an e-book that is sold could theoretically be read and/or checked out by a huge number of users, potentially damaging sales. However, some studies have found the opposite effect to be true (for example, Hilton and Wikey 2010).
Archival storage The
Internet Archive and
Open Library offer more than six million fully accessible public domain e-books.
Project Gutenberg has over 52,000 freely available
public domain e-books.
Dedicated hardware readers and mobile software An
e-reader, also called an
e-book reader or
e-book device, is a
mobile electronic device that is designed primarily for the purpose of reading
e-books and digital periodicals. An e-reader is similar in form, but more limited in purpose than a
tablet. In comparison to tablets, many e-readers are better than tablets for reading because they are more portable, have better readability in sunlight and have longer battery life. In July 2010, online bookseller
Amazon.com reported sales of e-books for its proprietary
Kindle, outnumbered sales of
hardcover books for the first time ever during the second
quarter of 2010, saying it sold 140 e-books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there was no
digital edition. By January 2011, e-book sales at Amazon had surpassed its paperback sales. In the overall US market, paperback book sales are still much larger than either hardcover or e-book. The American Publishing Association estimated e-books represented 8.5% of sales as of mid-2010, up from 3% a year before. At the end of the first quarter of 2012, e-book sales in the United States surpassed hardcover book sales for the first time. In November 2013, the FAA allowed use of e-readers on airplanes at all times if it is in Airplane Mode, which means all radios turned off, and Europe followed this guidance the next month. In 2014,
The New York Times predicted that by 2018 e-books will make up over 50% of total consumer publishing revenue in the United States and Great Britain.
Applications Some of the major book retailers and multiple third-party developers offer free (and in some third-party cases, premium paid) e-reader
software applications (apps) for the Mac and PC computers as well as for
Android,
Blackberry,
iPad,
iPhone,
Windows Phone and
Palm OS devices to allow the reading of e-books and other documents independently of dedicated e-book devices. Examples are apps for the
Amazon Kindle,
Barnes & Noble Nook,
iBooks,
Kobo eReader and
Sony Reader.
Timeline Before the 1980s ; •
Ángela Ruiz Robles patents the idea of the electronic book, called the Mechanical Encyclopedia, in
Galicia, Spain. •
Roberto Busa begins planning the
Index Thomisticus. ;c. 1979 • Roberto Busa finishes the
Index Thomisticus, a complete
lemmatisation of the 56 printed volumes of
Saint Thomas Aquinas and of a few related authors.
1980s and 1990s ;1986 •
Judy Malloy writes and programmes the first online
hypertext fiction,
Uncle Roger, with links that take the narrative in different directions depending on the reader's choice. ;1989 •
Franklin Computer releases an electronic edition of the
Bible that can only be read with a stand-alone device. ;1990 •
Eastgate Systems publishes the first hypertext fiction released on floppy disk,
afternoon, a story, by
Michael Joyce. • Electronic Book Technologies releases
DynaText, the first SGML-based system for delivering large-scale books such as aircraft technical manuals. It was later tested on a US aircraft carrier as replacement for paper manuals. •
Sony launches the
Data Discman e-book player. ;1991 •
Voyager Company develops
Expanded Books, which are books on
CD-ROM in a digital format. ;1992 • F. Crugnola and I. Rigamonti design and create the first e-reader, called Incipit, as a thesis project at the
Polytechnic University of Milan. •
Apple starts using its Doc Viewer format "to distribute documentation to developers in an electronic form", which effectively meant
Inside Macintosh books. ;1993 •
Peter James publishes his novel
Host on two
floppy disks, which at the time was called the "world's first electronic novel", a copy of it is stored at the
Science Museum. •
Hugo Award and
Nebula Award nominee works are included on a
CD-ROM by
Brad Templeton. • Launch of Bibliobytes, a website for obtaining e-books, both for free and for sale on the
Internet. • Paul Baim releases the EBook 1.0
HyperCard stack that allows the user to easily convert any text file into a
HyperCard based pageable book. together on a single CD-ROM in Apple Doc Viewer format. Apple subsequently switches to using
Adobe Acrobat. • The popular format for publishing e-books changes from plain text to
HTML. ;1995 • Online poet
Alexis Kirke discusses the need for wireless internet
electronic paper readers in his article "The Emuse". ;1996 •
Project Gutenberg reaches 1,000 titles. •
Joseph Jacobson works at
MIT to create
electronic ink, a high-contrast, low-cost, read/write/erase medium to display e-books. ;1997 •
E Ink Corporation is co-founded by MIT undergraduates
J.D. Albert,
Barrett Comiskey, MIT professor
Joseph Jacobson, as well as Jeremy Rubin and Russ Wilcox to create an electronic printing technology. This technology is later used on the displays of the
Sony Reader,
Barnes & Noble Nook, and
Amazon Kindle. ;1998 • Nuvo Media releases the first handheld e-reader, the
Rocket eBook. •
SoftBook launches its SoftBook reader. This e-reader, with expandable storage, could store up to 100,000 pages of content, including text, graphics and pictures. • The
Cybook is sold and manufactured at first by
Cytale (1998–2003) and later by
Bookeen. ;1999 • The
NIST releases the
Open eBook format based on
XML to the public domain; most future e-book formats derive from Open eBook. • Publisher
Simon & Schuster creates a new imprint called iBooks and becomes the first trade publisher to simultaneously publish some of its titles in e-book and print format. •
Oxford University Press makes a selection of its books available as e-books through netLibrary. • Publisher
Baen Books opens up the
Baen Free Library to make available Baen titles as free e-books. • Kim Blagg, via her company Books OnScreen, begins selling multimedia-enhanced e-books on CDs through retailers including
Amazon,
Barnes & Noble and
Borders.
2000s ;2000 • Joseph Jacobson, Barrett O. Comiskey and Jonathan D. Albert are granted
US patents related to displaying electronic books; these patents are later used in the displays for most e-readers. •
Stephen King releases his novella
Riding the Bullet exclusively online and it became the first mass-market e-book, selling 500,000 copies in 48 hours. •
Microsoft releases the
Microsoft Reader with
ClearType for increased readability on PCs and handheld devices. • Microsoft and Amazon work together to sell e-books that can be purchased on Amazon, and using Microsoft software downloaded to PCs and handhelds. • A digitized version of the
Gutenberg Bible is made available online at the
British Library. ;2001 • Adobe releases Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 allowing users to underline, take notes and bookmark. ;2002 •
Palm, Inc and
OverDrive, Inc make Palm Reader e-books available worldwide, offering over 5,000 e-books in several languages; these could be read on Palm PDAs or using a computer application. •
Random House and
HarperCollins start to sell digital versions of their titles in English. ;2004 • Sony Librie, the first e-reader using an
E Ink display is released; it has a six-inch screen. •
Google announces plans to digitize the holdings of several major libraries, as part of what would later be called the
Google Books Library Project. ;2005 • Amazon buys
Mobipocket, the creator of the mobi
e-book file format and e-reader software. • Google is sued for
copyright infringement by the
Authors Guild for scanning books still in copyright. ;2006 •
Sony Reader PRS-500, with an E Ink screen and two weeks of battery life, is released. • LibreDigital launches BookBrowse as an online reader for publisher content. ;2007 • The
International Digital Publishing Forum releases EPUB to replace Open eBook. • In November,
Amazon.com releases the
Kindle e-reader with 6-inch E Ink screen in the US and it sells outs in 5.5 hours. Simultaneously, the
Kindle Store opens, with initially more than 88,000 e-books available. ;2008 • Adobe and Sony agree to share their technologies (
Adobe Reader and
DRM) with each other. • Sony sells the
Sony Reader PRS-505 in UK and France. ;2009 •
Bookeen releases the
Cybook Opus in the US and Europe. • Sony releases the Reader Pocket Edition and Reader Touch Edition. • Amazon releases the
Kindle 2 that includes a text-to-speech feature. • Amazon releases the
Kindle DX that has a 9.7-inch screen in the U.S. • Barnes & Noble releases the
Nook e-reader in the US. • Amazon releases the Kindle for PC
application in late 2009, making the Kindle Store library available for the first time outside Kindle hardware.
2010s ;2010 • January – Amazon releases the
Kindle DX International Edition worldwide. • April –
Apple releases the
iPad bundled with an e-book app called
iBooks. • May – Kobo Inc. releases its
Kobo eReader to be sold at
Indigo/
Chapters in Canada and
Borders in the United States. • July – Amazon reports that its e-book sales outnumbered sales of
hardcover books for the first time during the second
quarter of 2010. • August – Amazon releases the third generation Kindle, available in
Wi-Fi and 3G & Wi-Fi versions. • October –
Bookeen reveals the
Cybook Orizon at
CES. • October –
Kobo Inc. releases an updated Kobo eReader, which includes Wi-Fi capability. • November –
The Sentimentalists wins the prestigious national
Giller Prize in Canada; due to the small scale of the novel's publisher, the book is not widely available in printed form, so the e-book edition becomes the top-selling title on
Kobo devices for 2010. • November – Barnes & Noble releases the
Nook Color, a color LCD tablet. • December – Google launches
Google eBooks offering over three million titles, becoming the world's largest e-book store to date. ;2011 • May – Amazon.com announces that its e-book sales in the US now exceed all of its printed book sales. • June – Barnes & Noble releases the
Nook Simple Touch e-reader and
Nook Tablet. • August –
Bookeen launches its own e-books store, BookeenStore.com, and starts to sell digital versions of titles in French. • September –
Nature Publishing releases the pilot version of
Principles of Biology, a customizable, modular textbook, with no corresponding paper edition. • June/November – As the e-reader market grows in Spain, companies like Telefónica, Fnac, and Casa del Libro launch their e-readers with the Spanish brand "bq readers". • November – Amazon launches the
Kindle Fire and
Kindle Touch, both devices designed for e-reading. ;2012 • E-book sales in the US market collect over three billion in revenue. • January – Apple releases
iBooks Author, software for creating
iPad e-books to be directly published in its
iBooks bookstore or to be shared as
PDF files. • January – Apple opens a
textbook section in its
iBooks bookstore. • February – Nature Publishing announces the worldwide release of
Principles of Biology, following the success of the pilot version some months earlier. • March – The publishing companies
Random House,
Holtzbrinck, and
arvato bring to market an e-book library called Skoobe. • March –
US Department of Justice prepares
anti-trust lawsuit against Apple,
Simon & Schuster,
Hachette Book Group,
Penguin Group,
Macmillan, and
HarperCollins, alleging
collusion to increase the price of books sold on Amazon. • March – PocketBook releases the PocketBook Touch, an E Ink Pearl e-reader, winning awards from German magazines
Tablet PC and
Computer Bild. • June – Kbuuk releases the
cloud-based e-book self-publishing
SaaS platform on the
Pubsoft digital publishing engine. • September – Amazon releases the
Kindle Paperwhite, its first e-reader with built-in front LED lights. ;2013 • April – Kobo releases the
Kobo Aura HD with a 6.8-inch screen, which is larger than the current models produced by its US competitors. • May –
Mofibo launches the first Scandinavian unlimited access e-book subscription service. • June –
Association of American Publishers announces that e-books now account for about 20% of book sales. Barnes & Noble estimates it has a 27% share of the US e-book market. • June – Barnes & Noble announces its intention to discontinue manufacturing Nook tablets, but to continue producing black-and-white e-readers such as the Nook Simple Touch. • Five major US e-book publishers, as part of their settlement of a price-fixing suit, are ordered to refund about $3 for every electronic copy of a New York Times best-seller that they sold from April 2010 to May 2012. • August – Kobo releases the
Kobo Aura, a baseline touchscreen six-inch e-reader. • September –
Oyster launches its unlimited access e-book subscription service. • November – US District Judge Chin sides with Google in
Authors Guild v. Google, citing fair use. The authors said they would appeal. • December –
Scribd launches the first public unlimited access subscription service for e-books. ;2014 • April – Kobo releases the
Aura H₂0, the world's first
waterproof commercially produced e-reader. • June – US District Court Judge Cote grants class action certification to plaintiffs in a lawsuit over Apple's alleged e-book price conspiracy; the plaintiffs are seeking $840 million in damages. Apple appeals the decision. • June – Apple settles the e-book antitrust case that alleged Apple conspired to e-book price fixing out of court with the States; however if Judge Cote's ruling is overturned in appeal the settlement would be reversed. • July – Amazon launches
Kindle Unlimited, an unlimited-access e-book and audiobook subscription service. ;2015 • June – The 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals with a 2:1 vote concurs with Judge Cote that Apple conspired to e-book price fixing and violated federal antitrust law. Apple appealed the decision. • June – Amazon releases the
Kindle Paperwhite (3rd generation) that is the first e-reader to feature
Bookerly, a font exclusively designed for e-readers. • September – Oyster announces its unlimited access e-book subscription service would be shut down in early 2016 and that it would be acquired by Google. • September – Malaysian e-book company,
e-Sentral, introduces for the first time geo-location distribution technology for e-books via bluetooth beacon. It was first demonstrated in a large scale at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. • October – Amazon releases the
Kindle Voyage that has a 6-inch, 300 ppi E Ink Carta HD display, which was the highest resolution and contrast available in e-readers as of 2014. It also features adaptive LED lights and page turn sensors on the sides of the device. • October – Barnes & Noble releases the
Glowlight Plus, its first waterproof e-reader. • October – The US appeals court sides with Google instead of the Authors' Guild, declaring that Google did not violate copyright law in its book scanning project. • December – Playster launches an unlimited-access subscription service including e-books and audiobooks. • By the end of 2015, Google Books scanned more than 25 million books. • April – The Supreme Court declines to hear the Authors Guild's appeal of its book scanning case, so the lower court's decision stands; the result means that Google can scan library books and display snippets in search results without violating US copyright law. • April – Amazon releases the
Kindle Oasis, its first e-reader in five years to have physical page turn buttons and, as a
premium product, it includes a leather case with a battery inside; without including the case, it is the lightest e-reader on the market to date. • August – Kobo releases the
Aura One, the first commercial e-reader with a 7.8-inch E Ink Carta HD display. • By the end of the year, smartphones and tablets have both individually overtaken e-readers as methods for reading an e-book, and paperback book sales are now higher than e-book sales. ;2017 • February – The
Association of American Publishers releases data showing that the US adult e-book market declined 16.9% in the first nine months of 2016 over the same period in 2015, and Nielsen Book determines that the e-book market had an overall total decline of 16% in 2016 over 2015, including all age groups. This decline is partly due to widespread e-book price increases by major publishers, which has increased the average e-book price from $6 to almost $10. • March –
The Guardian reports that sales of physical books are outperforming digital titles in the UK, since it can be cheaper to buy the physical version of a book when compared to the digital version due to Amazon's deal with publishers that allows agency pricing. • October – Amazon releases the Oasis 2, the first Kindle to be
IPX8 rated meaning that it is water resistant up to 2 meters for up to 60 minutes; it is also the first Kindle to enable white text on a black background, a feature that may be helpful for nighttime reading. ;2018 • January – U.S. public libraries report record-breaking borrowing of OverDrive e-books over the course of the year, with more than 274 million e-books loaned to card holders, a 22% increase over the 2017 figure. • October – The EU allowed its member countries to charge the same
VAT for ebooks as for paper books. ;2019 • May – Barnes & Noble releases the GlowLight Plus e-reader, the largest Nook e-reader to date with a 7.8-inch E Ink screen. ==Formats==