We’re all working hard on our project with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. As part of that, here’s our timeline of book publishing via RSS and blogs. Make sure to go the end. By Kate Zimmermann, with a few links from me.

1971: Project Gutenberg

First established collection of text documents published in easily stored and distributed digital format. A project by Michael Hart at the University of Illinois, the first published “ebooks” were the United States Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Project Gutenberg is the oldest library of free online books, today holding over 17,000 catalogued texts.

1984: Copyleft

First Copyleft license created by Richard Stallman to allow 3rd party improvements to his Lisp interpreter software. Called the GNU General Public License (GPL), the original copyleft license introduced the fundamental technique used to subvert restrictions imposed by copyrights.

1994: Justin Hall’s Links from the Underground

Often cited as the first weblog – Justin Hall’s blog marks the introduction of the concept of a serially updated website.

1995: “Being Digital”

By Nicholas Negroponte (columnist for Wired Magazine), published by Alfred A. Knopf – Early innovator of ebooks. Negroponte’s book accompanied his columns in Wired, which advocated the storage and shelf-life benefits of digital text over printed content. Negroponte made parts of his book available in full text online, with internal links between chapters and external links to his columns published at Wired. The site included an Intro, linked Table of Contents, body text, Comments section, External Links, and a “Being Digital” Forum*.

Though this project is an early precursor to the Pulse Project, Negroponte’s intention was to prove his point about digital storage, not to create a content-sharing digital revolution. In his Feb. 1996 Wired article, when he theorizes on the Future of the Book: “A new effort by Joe Jacobson at the Media Lab involves electronic paper, a high-contrast, low-cost, read/write/erase medium. By binding these pulplike, electronic leaves, lo and behold – you have an electronic book. These are quite literally pages onto which you can download words, in any type, in any size…This is the likely future of books.”

*Forum no longer active.

1996: Xanga

Xanga, First blog platform software released.

December 1996: Meta Content Framework

Proposed by Ramanathan Guha at Apple – this is the first introduction of a pre-XML open filesharing format for digital information.

1997: RSS 1.0

Dave Winer creates XML syndication format called RSS 1.0 for his blog Scripting News. – first instance of RSS for blogging.

1998: Open Source Movement

Open Source Initiative (OSI) started by John Hall, Larry Augustin, Eric S. Raymond, Bruce Perens, and others, based on their Open Source Definition for open-source software (an alternative label for free software). Linux is direct development of Open Source Movement.

1999: Open Diary, Pitas and Diaryland

Release of more blog platform applications increase popularity of blog publication medium.

1999: Webscriptions

Baen Books, a science fiction publisher, launches Webscriptions, a service that gives customers subscription access to serialized digital versions of recent publications, and free access to digitized publications from their backlist. This is the premise for the concept of sharing digital books in order to increase print sales.

August 1999: Blogger

Blogger.com released – later to become most popular blog hosting software, purchased by Google in Feb. 2003.

2001: Blogging & Journalism

Academics and journalists alike admit powerful journalistic force of bloggers. First nationally popular political bloggers (Andrew Sullivan, Political Wire, MyDD.com, etc) appear on TV programs, in radio interviews, and are quoted in news publications.

December 2001: Safari Books Online

O’Reilly and Pearson launch Safari Books Online – subscription service offering full-text access to their online libraries. Made available in digital “bookshelves”, subscribers pay to browse and store the ebook versions of O’Reilly and Pearson publications.

2002: Lulu

Lulu.com launches, becomes popular Print On Demand online publisher.

2002: Daily Kos

Launch of the popular political blog Daily Kos.

September 2002: RSS 2.0

Dave Winer releases RSS (Really Simple Syndication) 2.0.

October 2002: “Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing”.

Clay Shirky theorizes the future of publishing via weblogs. Discusses inefficiencies of print publishing and mass amateurization of blog publishing.

November 2002: Tipping Point for RSS 2.0

The New York Times adopts RSS 2.0 as an optional subscription medium for readers.

December 2002: “Blook”

Term “Blook” is coined by Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine, to describe a printed book whose content was originally posted on a blog. Term taken from Tony Pierce’s publication, titled “Blook”, which was a collection of his blog posts.

January 2003: Creative Commons

First Creative Commons book license issued for Cory Doctorow’s digital publication of “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” – making it available as a free download. The Creative Commons license offers flexible copyrights for works published on the Internet.

February 2004: Emerging Technologies Conference

Cory Doctorow writes, “Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books” for the O’Reilly Emerging Technolgies Conference. Outlines his theory of ebooks and future of publishing: Ebooks are marketing vehicles, ebooks compliment print books, ebooks demand a different attention span, ebooks are powerful because they can be re-mixed, searched and shared. Announces re-release of “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” as re-mixable book (under new Creative Commons license).

December 2004: Google Books

Google launches program with numerous academic libraries (Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, New York Public Library, etc) to scan and publish their collections, making books available for full-text search and full-image viewing.

January 2005: Russell Beattie Notebook

Russell Beattie blogs first record of releasing digital books as syndicated RSS Feeds:
“I just had an idea for a system where you could choose any one of the public domain eBooks out there and have a small chunk delivered daily via RSS… With that theory in mind, I added a new feature to Mobdex.com. You can now subscribe serially to any of the ebooks there…” His ebook site, Mobdex, is no longer available online.

September 2005: Hackoff.com

Tom Evslin launches hackoff.com, a blog site dedicated to the serial release of his book. Hackoff is available as a PDF download, RSS, email, or audio. Though syndicated serially through RSS as blog posts, the text itself does not incorporate any linking or keyword strategy, using the blog format as a time-stamped publication method.

October 2005: RSS for Cory Doctorow

A New Zealand blogger, Charles Coxhead, downloads Cory Doctorow’s e-book “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town” and makes it available as a serialized RSS feed. Set up as a scheduled delivery mechanism ,the RSS feed starts at Ch. 1 and delivers a chapter a day, until finished. The feed doesn’t link back to content on a blog post or static website, but its contained in the feed itself and is viewable only by RSS.

October 2005: Blooker Prize

Lulu Blooker Prize – First contest for “Blook” publications (or, printed books that were originally published as blog content).

October 2005: RSS Adoption

The RSS Diary reports that 12% of Internet users are aware of RSS. 4% Have knowingly used RSS. 27% of users consume RSS syndicated content on personalized start pages without knowing that RSS is the enabling technology. 52% of RSS subscriptions are to News feeds, 34% to Entertainment feeds, 31% to Weather feeds, and 10% are Online Commerce feeds.

December 2005: Universal RSS Icon

In December 2005, the Microsoft IE team and Outlook team announced in their blogs that they will be adopting the RSS icon, livemark.png, first used in the Mozilla Firefox browser, effectively making the orange square with white radio waves the industry standard.

February 2006: State of the Blogosphere

Technorati’s Dave Sifry posts comprehensive statistics on the State of the Blogosphere. Sifry reports that Technorati currently tracks 27.2 million weblogs, a number that has doubled every 5 months for the past 20 months. Blogosphere is 60 times larger than it was in 2003, with 75,000 new blogs being created every day (on average, a new blog is created every second). 2.7 million blogs have been in existence for at least 3 months and are updated weekly. 50,000 new post being made each hour. Half of all blog posts use tags or categories. Boing Boing, Engaget, PostSecret, Slashdot and Daily Kos are all listed in top 30 sources of Mainstream Media online.

April 10, 2006: Pulse

Names@Work, on behalf of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, publishes the full text of Pulse via serial RSS simultaneously with the printed version. Online text is linked out from by Names@Work and fully tagged. Sneak preview, April 3 to April 10, available to those read this far.

Corrections please as always!

Tags: project gutenberg, Copyleft, Richard Stallman, GPL Licenses, Justin Hall, Nicholas Negroponte, Xanga, Ramanathan Gupa, Dave Winer, Open Source Initiative, Open Diary, Pitas, Diaryland, Webscriptions, Andrew Sullivan, MyDD, Political Wire, Safari Books Online, Lulu.com, Daily Kos, RSS, Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, Buzzmachine, Tony Pierce, Creative Commons, Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Russell Beattie, hackoff.com, Tom Evslin, Charles Coxhead, Blooker Prize, RSS Diary, Dave Sifry, State of the Blogosphere, Pulse, Farrar Straus Giroux, Robert Frenay

Posted by Antony in: Blogs, Media + Marketing, News