highways… and reading!"

According to a survey for Online MSNBC in February 1998, the internet - as a new medium - was well liked, matching and sometimes surpassing other media. Merrill Brown, editor-in- chief of Online MSNBC, wrote in Internet Wire of February 1998: "The internet news usage behavior pattern is shaping up similar to broadcast television in terms of weekday use, and is used more than cable television, newspapers and magazines during that same period of time. Additionally, on Saturdays, the internet is used more than broadcast television, radio or newspapers, and on a weekly basis has nearly the same hours of use as newspapers." People were spending 2.4 hours per week reading magazines, 3.5 hours surfing the web, 3.6 hours reading newspapers, 4.5 hours listening the radio, 5 hours watching cable TV, and 5.7 hours watching broadcast TV.

Jean-Pierre Cloutier was the editor of "Chroniques de Cybérie", a weekly French-language online report of internet news. When interviewed in fall 1997 by François Lemelin, chief-editor of "L'Album", a magazine from Club Macintosh of Quebec, he expressed his views about the internet as a medium: "I think the medium is going to continue being essential, and then give birth to original, precise, specific services, by which time we will have found an economic model of viability. For information cybermedia like "Chroniques de Cybérie" as well as for info- services, community and online public services, electronic commerce, distance learning, the post-modern policy which is going to change the elected representatives / principals, in fact, everything is coming around. (…) Concerning the relationship with other media, I think we need to look backwards. Contrary to the words of alarmists in previous times, radio didn't kill music or the entertainment industry any more than the cinema did. Television didn't kill radio or cinema. Nor did home videos. When a new medium arrives, it makes some room for itself, the others adjust, there is a transition period, then a 'convergence'. What is different with the internet is the interactive dimension of the medium and its possible impact. We are still thinking about that, we are watching to see what happens.

Also, as a medium, the net allows the emergence of new concepts in the field of communication, and on the human level, too - even for non-connected people. I remember when McLuhan arrived, at the end of the sixties, with his concept of 'global village' basing itself on television and telephone, and he was predicting data exchange between computers. There were people, in Africa, without television and telephone, who read and understood McLuhan. And McLuhan changed things in their vision of the world. The internet has the same effect. It gives rise to some thinking on communication, private life, freedom of expression, the values we are attached to, and those we are ready to get rid of, and it is this effect which makes it such a powerful, important medium."

= "The dream behind the web"

Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in 1990. Pierre Ruetschi, a journalist for the Swiss daily Tribune de Genève, asked him in December 1997: "Seven years later, are you satisfied with the way the web has evolved?". He answered that, if he was pleased with the richness and diversity of information, the web still lacked the power planned in its original design. He would like "the web to be more interactive, and people to be able to create information together", and not only to be consumers of information. The web was supposed to become a "medium for collaboration, a world of knowledge that we share."

In a short essay posted on his webpage, Tim Berners-Lee wrote in May 1998: "The dream behind the web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was online, we could then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together." (excerpt from: "The World Wide Web: A very short personal history", available on the W3C website)

1993: THE ONLINE BOOKS PAGE IS A LIST OF FREE EBOOKS

= [Overview]

Founded in 1993 by John Mark Ockerbloom while he was a student at Carnegie Mellon University (in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), The Online Books Page is "a website that facilitates access to books that are freely readable over the internet. It also aims to encourage the development of such online books, for the benefit and edification of all." John Mark first maintained this page on the website of the School of Computer Science of Carnegie Mellon University. In 1999, he moved it to its present location at the University of Pennsylvania Library, where he is a digital library planner and researcher. The Online Books Page offered links to 12,000 books in 1999, 20,000 books in 2003 (including 4,000 books published by women), 25,000 books in 2006, and 30,000 books in 2008. The books "have been authored, placed online, and hosted by a wide variety of individuals and groups throughout the world", with 7,000 books from Project Gutenberg. The FAQ also gives copyright information about most countries in the world with links to further reading.

= [In Depth]

In 1993, the web was still in its infancy, with Mosaic as its first browser. John Mark Ockerbloom was a graduate student at the School of Computer Science (CS) of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). He created The Online Books Page as "a website that facilitates access to books that are freely readable over the internet. It also aims to encourage the development of such online books, for the benefit and edification of all." (excerpt from the website)

In September 1998, John Mark wrote in an email interview: "I was the original webmaster here at CMU CS, and started our local web in 1993. The local web included pages pointing to various locally developed resources, and originally The Online Books Page was just one of these pages, containing pointers to some books put online by some of the people in our department. (Robert Stockton had made web versions of some of Project Gutenberg's texts.) After a while, people started asking about books at other sites, and I noticed that a number of sites (not just Gutenberg, but also Wiretap and some other places) had books online, and that it would be useful to have some listing of all of them, so that you could go to one place to download or view books from all over the net. So that's how my index got started. I eventually gave up the webmaster job in 1996, but kept The Online Books Page, since by then I'd gotten very interested in the great potential the net had for making literature available to a wide audience. At this point there are so many books going online that I have a hard time keeping up (and in fact have a large backlog of books to list). But I hope to keep up my online books works in some form or another. 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."

In 1998, there was an index of 7,000 etexts that could be browsed by author, title or subject. There were also pointers to significant directories and archives of