4 ms·

Text files. ASCII text. The same page has a link to a Project Gutenberg book about the first 45 years of digitizing ebooks. First document he did was the U.S De

Text files. ASCII text. The same page has a link to a Project Gutenberg book about the first 45 years of digitizing ebooks. First document he did was the U.S Declaration of Independence hand typed on a teletype. They didn't get a scanner and OCR until the 90s and didn't move to HTML until then either.

bambax 5y ago
Okay... but how is a text file an "ebook"? I'm not sure I understand it today, so I certainly will not blame anyone for not understanding it at the time ;-)
- mavhc 5y ago
  It's a book, and it's electronic
- m12k 5y ago
  I mean, if you put all the text from a book into a txt file, how is it not an ebook? Does being an "ebook" come from being a digital representation of a book, or is it a reserved title for something in a specific file format created for the purpose such as .epub or .mobi? As far as I know ebook just means electronic book, and a txt file can check both those boxes if it has the right content.
  - bambax 5y ago
    I answered below, but my point is it's hard to conceptualize an "ebook" without an ebook reader. (Of course the technical format is irrelevant.)
    - jhbadger 5y ago
      But there are lots of things you can do with an ebook besides read it. One thing that started earlier than people might think is "digital humanities"; that is literary analysis by computer. You could do things like look at word usage in a text by an unknown author and compare it to word usages by known authors and try to identify the author. Or you could compare versions of a text and basically make an evolutionary tree of changes and use this to infer what the original version was like. Of course people had been doing these things by hand, but having computer readable ebooks made it possible to write programs to do them.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Digitised text is the essence of a book. Hart's goal wasn't hardware. It was the (compartively) harder task of getting text into digital format. Written language is highly presentation-independent.
  - bambax 5y ago
    Yeah, you're right, but that's what's difficult for me to accept. A traditional book is a piece of hardware. It's a bunch of paper pages tied together, with some content printed on the pages. If you separate the content from the hardware, you hardly have a "book", e- or not. You have some content floating around, and big machines that are difficult to use and even more difficult to access (cost, scarcity, location) to read it. That's probably the genius of inventors: they see things that aren't there.
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      You've had the answer, several times. You don't like it. The problem doesn't lie with the answer.
      - bambax 5y ago
        I'm not arguing. I'm just trying to explain my gut reaction. But it's really not important.
        sleightofmind 5y ago
        I feel for your "gut". Often, if I'm learning a new math concept, my head says, "Yeah, I can do that manipulation just fine," but my gut says, "Something's not right here. Nope. Uh huh. Don't like it." And it's very hard to shake gut reactions be they true or false. Here's a rhetorical question: When I read a Kindle-format book from Amazon on the Kindle Cloud Reading app on my laptop, what did I just read? Was it an eBook or not? If not, was it a book in any sense? If someone asks, "Did you read the book, The Cuckoo's Egg?" I'd answer yes, even though I read it electronically -- which is, I presume what the e in eBook stands for. Or do I answer, "No," because it was just digital data on a computer -- absent a standalone eBook device? I have an eBook reader that came as part of the Calibre package, at least they call it an eBook reader -- it's just a program to read epubs. Is it is, or is it ain't an eBook reader?
dredmorbius 5y ago
Actually, EBCDIC, which was the character encoding used on the SDS Sigma series computer Hart first had access to. But yes, flatfile text documents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDS_Sigma_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDS_Sigma_series There's a slightly more technical history linked from the submitted article: https://www.gutenberg.org/about/background/history_and_philosophy.html https://www.gutenberg.org/about/background/history_and_philo...

bambax 5y ago

Okay... but how is a text file an "ebook"? I'm not sure I understand it today, so I certainly will not blame anyone for not understanding it at the time ;-)

mavhc 5y ago
It's a book, and it's electronic
m12k 5y ago
I mean, if you put all the text from a book into a txt file, how is it not an ebook? Does being an "ebook" come from being a digital representation of a book, or is it a reserved title for something in a specific file format created for the purpose such as .epub or .mobi? As far as I know ebook just means electronic book, and a txt file can check both those boxes if it has the right content.
- bambax 5y ago
  I answered below, but my point is it's hard to conceptualize an "ebook" without an ebook reader. (Of course the technical format is irrelevant.)
  - jhbadger 5y ago
    But there are lots of things you can do with an ebook besides read it. One thing that started earlier than people might think is "digital humanities"; that is literary analysis by computer. You could do things like look at word usage in a text by an unknown author and compare it to word usages by known authors and try to identify the author. Or you could compare versions of a text and basically make an evolutionary tree of changes and use this to infer what the original version was like. Of course people had been doing these things by hand, but having computer readable ebooks made it possible to write programs to do them.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Digitised text is the essence of a book. Hart's goal wasn't hardware. It was the (compartively) harder task of getting text into digital format. Written language is highly presentation-independent.
- bambax 5y ago
  Yeah, you're right, but that's what's difficult for me to accept. A traditional book is a piece of hardware. It's a bunch of paper pages tied together, with some content printed on the pages. If you separate the content from the hardware, you hardly have a "book", e- or not. You have some content floating around, and big machines that are difficult to use and even more difficult to access (cost, scarcity, location) to read it. That's probably the genius of inventors: they see things that aren't there.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    You've had the answer, several times. You don't like it. The problem doesn't lie with the answer.
    - bambax 5y ago
      I'm not arguing. I'm just trying to explain my gut reaction. But it's really not important.
      - sleightofmind 5y ago
        I feel for your "gut". Often, if I'm learning a new math concept, my head says, "Yeah, I can do that manipulation just fine," but my gut says, "Something's not right here. Nope. Uh huh. Don't like it." And it's very hard to shake gut reactions be they true or false. Here's a rhetorical question: When I read a Kindle-format book from Amazon on the Kindle Cloud Reading app on my laptop, what did I just read? Was it an eBook or not? If not, was it a book in any sense? If someone asks, "Did you read the book, The Cuckoo's Egg?" I'd answer yes, even though I read it electronically -- which is, I presume what the e in eBook stands for. Or do I answer, "No," because it was just digital data on a computer -- absent a standalone eBook device? I have an eBook reader that came as part of the Calibre package, at least they call it an eBook reader -- it's just a program to read epubs. Is it is, or is it ain't an eBook reader?

dredmorbius 5y ago

Actually, EBCDIC, which was the character encoding used on the SDS Sigma series computer Hart first had access to. But yes, flatfile text documents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDS_Sigma_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDS_Sigma_series There's a slightly more technical history linked from the submitted article: https://www.gutenberg.org/about/background/history_and_philosophy.html https://www.gutenberg.org/about/background/history_and_philo...