publishers, retailers and end users to publish, distribute, purchase and read electronic content securely and efficiently on the internet." NuvoMedia's investors were Barnes & Noble and Bertelsmann. The connection between the Rocket eBook and the computer (PC or Macintosh) was made through the Rocket eBook Cradle, which provided power through a wall transformer, and connected to the computer with a serial cable.

1999 > The SoftBook Reader was the second ebook reader

SoftBook Press created the SoftBook Reader in 1999, along with the SoftBook Network, an internet-based content delivery service. With the SoftBook Reader, "people could easily, quickly and securely download a wide selection of books and periodicals using its built-in internet connection", with a device that, "unlike a computer, was ergonomically designed for the reading of long documents and books." The investors of Softbook Press were Random House and Simon & Schuster.

1999 > Other pioneer ebook readers

Other pioneer ebook readers were launched in 1999, for example EveryBook and the Millennium eBook (Librius). EveryBook (EB) was "a living library in a single book". The EveryBook's electronic storage could hold 100 textbooks or 500 novels. The EveryBook used a "hidden" modem to dial into the EveryBook Store, for people to browse, purchase, and receive full text books, magazines, and sheet music. The Millennium eBook was a "small low-cost" ebook reader launched by Librius, a "full- service e-commerce company". Librius's website offered a World Bookstore that "delivered digital copies of thousands of books" via the internet.

1999 > A website for the Ulysses Bookstore, the oldest travel bookstore in the world

Created in 1971 by Catherine Domain in the center of Paris, France, on Ile Saint-Louis in the middle of the river Seine, the Ulysses Bookstore (Librairie Ulysse) is the oldest travel bookstore in the world, with 20,000 books, maps and magazines, out of print and new. Catherine, an avid traveler herself, started a website in early 1999, as a virtual travel in the field of computing, and wrote in November 2000: "My site is still pretty basic and under construction. Like my bookstore, it is a place to meet people before being a place of business. The internet is a pain in the neck, takes a lot of my time and I earn hardly any money, but that doesn't worry me… I am very pessimistic though, because it is killing off specialist bookstores." (NEF Interview)

1999 > WordReference.com: free bilingual online dictionaries

WordReference.com was created in 1999 by Michael Kellogg, who wrote much later on his project's website: "I started this site in 1999 in an effort to provide free online bilingual dictionaries and tools to the world for free on the internet. The site has grown gradually ever since to become one of the most-used online dictionaries, and the top online dictionary for its language pairs of English-Spanish, English- French, English-Italian, Spanish-French, and Spanish-Portuguese. Today, I am happy to continue working on improving the dictionaries, its tools and the language forums. I really do enjoy creating new features to make the site more and more useful."

1999 > Wordfast, a translation memory software

Created in 1999 by Yves Champollion in Paris, France, Wordfast is a translation memory software with terminology processing in real time. Worldfast was compatible with the IBM WebSphere Translation Server and other translation memory software like Trados. During a few years, a basic version of Wordfast was also available for free, with a manual in 16 languages. In 2010, Wordfast is the most widely used translation memory solution on both Windows and Mac platforms,, and the second most widely used translation memory software on Windows (the first one being SDL Trados), with over 20.000 customer deployments, including the United Nations, Nomura Securities, the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), and McGraw-Hill.

September 1999 > OeB (Open eBook), a standard format for ebooks

With so many formats showing up in the late 1990s for new reading devices, the digital publishing industry felt the need to work on a common format for ebooks. In September 1999, it released the first version of the Open eBook (OeB) format, based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and defined by the Open eBook Publication Structure (OeBPS). The Open eBook Forum was then created in January 2000 to develop the OeB format and OeBPS specifications. Since 2000, most ebook formats have been derived from - or are compatible with - the OeB format, for example the PRC format from Mobipocket or the LIT format from Microsoft.

December 1999 > Britannica.com, the web version of the Encyclopedia
Britannica

Britannica.com was launched in December 1999, as the digital equivalent of the 32 volumes of the 15th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The website was available for free - as a complement to the print and CD-ROM versions (for sale) -, with a selection of articles from 70 magazines, a guide to the best websites, a selection of books, etc., all searchable through a single search engine. In September 2000, the site was among the top 100 websites in the world. In July 2001, the website, not free anymore, was available for a monthly or annual fee. In 2009, Britannica.com opened its website to external contributors, with registration required to write and edit articles.

December 1999 > Two main French-language encyclopedias on the web

Launched by Editions Atlas in December 1999, Webencyclo was the first main French-language online encyclopedia available for free. It was searchable by keyword, topic, media (maps, links, photos, and illustrations) and ideas. A call for papers invited specialists in a given topic to become external contributors and submit articles in a section called "Webencyclo Contributif". Later on, a free registration was required to use the online encyclopedia. Launched at the same time, the website of Encyclopedia Universalis included 28,000 articles by 4,000 contributors, available for an annual subscription fee, with a number of articles also available for free.

January 2000 > The Million Book Project, to digitize one million books

Launched in January 2000 by the Carnegie Mellon University (Pennsylvania, United States), the Million Book Project - also called the Universal Library or Universal Digital Library (UDL) - aimed to digitize one million books in a number of languages, including in India and China. The project was completed in 2007, with one million books available on the university website, as image files in DjVu and TIFF formats, and with three mirror sites in northern China, southern China, and India. The project may have inspired the Open Content Alliance (OCA), a universal public digital library launched by the Internet Archive in October 2005.

February 2000 > yourDictionary.com, a portal for linguistic tools in all languages

Robert Beard, a professor at Bucknell University (USA), co-founded yourDictionary.com in February 2000, as a follow-up of his first website, A Web of Online Dictionaries (included in the new one), launched in 1995 as a directory of online dictionaries (with 800 links in fall 1998) and other linguistic resources such as thesauri, vocabularies, glossaries, grammars, and language textbooks. yourDictionary.com included 1,800 dictionaries in 250 languages in September 2003, and 2,500 dictionaries in 300 languages in April 2007. As a tool for all languages without exception, the portal also offered the Endangered Language Repository.

March 2000 > The Oxford English Dictionary online

The online version (for a subscription fee) of the