id="id00049">NAP (National Academy Press, later renamed National Academies Press) was the first publisher in 1994 to post the full text of some of its books on its website, for free, with the authors' consent, and to use the web as a marketing tool to sell print versions. NAP was created by the National Academy of Sciences to publish its own reports and the ones of the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council. In 1994, NAP was publishing 200 new books a year in science, engineering, and health. Oddly enough, there was no drop in sales for books also available for free on the web. On the contrary, sales increased. In 1998, the new NAP Reading Room offered 1,000 free digital versions in various formats ("image", HTML, PDF).

1995 > The MIT Press followed NAP

In 1995, the MIT Press was publishing 200 new books per year and 40 journals, in science and technology, architecture, social theory, economics, cognitive science, and computational science. The MIT Press decided to put a number of books online for free, as "a long-term commitment to the efficient and creative use of new technologies". Sales of print books with a free online version increased. This initiative was praised by other publishers. But they were reluctant to launch similar experiences because of the cost of publishing online thousands of pages, problems linked to copyright, and the fear of free versions "competing" with print sales.

1995 > The Internet Dictionary Project: collaborative dictionaries on the internet

After launching the Human-Languages Page (H-LP) in May 1994, Tyler Chambers launched the Internet Dictionary Project (IDP) in 1995. The IDP was a collaborative project to create free collaborative online dictionaries from English to other languages (French, German, Italian, Latin, Portuguese, and Spanish). As explained on the project's website in September 1998: "The Internet Dictionary Project's goal is to create royalty-free translating dictionaries through the help of the internet's citizens. This site allows individuals from all over the world to visit and assist in the translation of English words into other languages. The resulting lists of English words and their translated counterparts are then made available through this site to anyone, with no restrictions on their use." Twelve years later, in January 2007, Tyler ran out of time to manage this project, and removed the ability to update the dictionaries, but people could still search the available dictionaries or download the archived files.

1995 > NetGlos, a collaborative online glossary of the internet

Launched in 1995 by the WorldWide Language Institute (WWLI), an institute providing language instruction via the internet, NetGlos — which stands for "Multilingual Glossary of Internet Terminology" - was compiled as a voluntary, collaborative project by a number of translators and other language professionals worldwide. In September 1998, NetGlos was available in the following languages: Chinese, Croatian, English, Dutch/Flemish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Maori, Norwegian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

1995 > The print press went online in the U.S.

The first electronic versions of print daily newspapers were available in the early 1990s through commercial services like America Online and CompuServe. In 1995, newspapers and magazines began offering websites with a partial or full version of their latest issue - available freely or through free or paid subscription - as well as online archives. For example, the site of The New York Times site could be accessed free of charge, with articles of the print newspaper, breaking news updated every ten minutes, and original reporting only available online. The site of The Washington Post gave the daily news online, with a full database of articles including images, sound and video. The computer press went logically online as well, including the monthly Wired, created in 1992 in California to cover cyberculture as "the magazine of the future at the avant-garde of the 21st century".

1995 > The print press went online worldwide

In Europe, for example, the daily Times (United Kingdom) and the Sunday
Times launched in 1995 a common website called Times Online, with a way
to create a personalized edition. The weekly The Economist (United
Kingdom) went online as well, followed by the weekly Le Monde
Diplomatique (France), the daily Le Monde (France), the daily
Libération (France), the daily El País (Spain), the weekly Focus
(Germany) and the weekly Der Spiegel (Germany).

July 1995 > Amazon.com, a pioneer of cyber-commerce

The online bookstore Amazon.com was launched by Jeff Bezos in July 1995, in Seattle (United States), after a market study which led him to conclude that books were the best products to sell on the internet. When Amazon.com started, it had 10 employees and a catalog of 3 million books. Unlike traditional bookstores, Amazon's windows were its webpages, with all transactions made through the internet. Books were stored in huge storage facilities before being put into boxes and sent by mail. In November 2000, Amazon had 7,500 employees, a catalog of 28 million items, 23 million clients worldwide and four subsidiaries in United Kingdom (launched in August 1998), Germany (August 1998), France (August 2000), and Japan (November 2000). A fifth subsidiary opened in Canada in June 2002. A sixth subsidiary, named Joyo, opened in China in September 2004.

December 1995 > The Kotoba Home Page, to read several languages on the computer screen

Yoshi Mikami, a computer scientist at Asia Info Network in Fujisawa, Japan, created in December 1995 the website "The Languages of the World by Computers and the Internet", also known as the Logos Home Page or Kotoba Home Page, "to summarize there the brief history, linguistic and phonetic features, writing system and computer processing aspects for each of the six major languages of the world, in English and Japanese". Yoshi was also the co-author (with Kenji Sekine and Nobutoshi Kohara) of "The Multilingual Web Guide" (Japanese edition), a print book published by O'Reilly Japan in August 1997, and translated in 1998 into English, French, and German.

March 1996 > The Palm Pilot was the first PDA

Palm, a company based in California, launched the Palm Pilot in March 1996 as the first PDA, and sold 23 million devices between 1996 and 2002. Its operating system was the Palm OS and its reading software the Palm Reader. In March 2001, Palm users could also use the Mobipocket Reader, and Palm bought Peanutpress.com, a company specializing in digital books for PDA, with its Peanut Reader and 2,000 titles that were transferred to Palm's digital bookstore, called Palm Digital Media. While some book professionals were concerned about the small screen, Palm users found the screen size wasn't a problem to read a book.

April 1996 > The Internet Archive, to archive the web every two months or so

Founded in April 1996 by Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive is a non- profit organization that has built an "internet library" to offer permanent access to historical collections in digital format for researchers, historians and scholars. An archive of the web is stored every two months or so. In late 1999, the Internet Archive started to include collections of archived webpages on specific topics. It also became an online digital library of text, audio, software, image and video content. In October 2001, with 30 billion stored webpages, the Internet Archive launched the Wayback Machine, for users to be able to surf the archive of the web by date. In 2004, there were 300 terabytes of data, with a growth of 12 terabytes per month. There were 65