Re: origin of "ebook"
"Christopher R. Maden" <crism-KB/[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.culture.literature.ebook-community |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
On 04/18/2013 04:05 AM, josephHarris wrote:
> I recall about ten or a dozen years ago someone on this list claimed
> to have the first to suggest and use the term "ebook" [it may have
> been as "e-book", "E-book" or "Ebook"], but I cannot recall now who,
> and cannot face digging out my old discs.
>
> Who was it; are they still on the list; and when did they first use
> it?
The Wikipedia article[*] notes that the FRESS project at Brown U. in the
1960s used the term “electronic book,” probably due to Prof. Andy van
Dam. (Some of van Dam’s students founded Electronic Book Technologies,
Inc., in 1990.) That same article says that “ebook” was a
well-established term by 1985, but does not say when the contraction
happened.
Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg is another candidate for coining the
term, as is the team at Xerox PARC that created the Dynabook (unrelated
to EBT’s DynaText or Toshiba’s Dynabook).
Various dictionaries cite the word to 1980–5, but are not more specific.
I’ve asked a friend who is a science editor at a major dictionary to
research it.
~Chris
[*] <URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-book >
--
Chris Maden, text nerd <URL: http://crism.maden.org/ >
FIVE TONS OF FLAX
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