affiliate websites in May 1998, including CNN Interactive, Lycos and ZDNet. One year later, Barnes & Noble.com launched a revamped website with a better design, an Express Lane one- click ordering, improved book search capabilities, and a new software "superstore". A fierce price war began with Amazon for the best book discounts, and Amazon.com came to be known as Amazon.toast, which didn’t last. With a two-year head start, Amazon stayed ahead in the competition.

Amazon launched its eBookStore in November 2000, three months after Barnes & Noble, after partnering in August 2000 with Microsoft to sell ebooks for the Microsoft Reader, and with Adobe to offer ebooks for the Acrobat Reader and the Glassbook Reader — Adobe had just bought Glassbook, its reader and its digital bookstore. In April 2001, Amazon.com partnered again with Adobe to include 2,000 copyrighted books for the Acrobat eBook Reader, mainly titles from major publishers, travel guides and children books.

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, and a sixth subsidiary, named Joyo, opened in China in September 2004. In July 2005, for its 10th anniversary, Amazon had 9,000 employees and 41 million clients.

1996 > THE INTERNET ARCHIVE, FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS

[Summary] Founded in April 1996 by Brewster Kahle in San Francisco, California, the Internet Archive wanted to offer a permanent access of the web “through the ages” to present and future generations. In October 2001, with 30 billion stored webpages, the Internet Archive launched the Wayback Machine, for internet users throughout the world to be able to surf the archive of a given website by date. In 2004, there were 300 terabytes of data, with a growth of 12 terabytes per month. There were 65 billion webpages (from 50 million websites) in 2006, 85 billion webpages in 2008, and 150 billion webpages in March 2010. The Internet Archive has also defined itself as "a nonprofit digital library dedicated to providing universal access to human knowledge", building up an online library of text, audio, software, image and video content. In October 2005, it launched the Open Content Alliance (OCA) with a number of partner organizations to build a universal digital library of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content.

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Founded in April 1996 by Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive wanted to offer permanent access of the web “through the ages” to present and future generations.

As explained on the website at the time, throughout history, societies have sought to preserve their culture and heritage for present and future generations, and libraries have been created to preserve the paper trail of that culture and legacy, and to facilitate its access to the general public and researchers. Therefore it seems essential to extend their mission to new technology. Paradoxically this was done poorly in the early 20th century. Many movies were recycled — and thus lost forever — to retrieve the silver layer. Many radio or TV programs were not saved. It is important not to repeat the same mistakes for the internet, especially for the web, a new medium the extent of which is still unknown in 1996. This is the raison d’être of the Internet Archive, that has defined itself as "a nonprofit digital library dedicated to providing universal access to human knowledge."

The whole web was stored every two months or so on the servers of the Internet Archive in San Francisco, California, for researchers, historians and scholars to be able to access it.

In October 2001, with 30 billion stored webpages, the Internet Archive launched the Wayback Machine, for internet users throughout the world to be able to surf the archive of a given website by date.

In 2004, there were 300 terabytes of data, with a growth of 12 terabytes per month. There were 65 billion pages (from 50 million websites) in 2006, 85 billion pages in 2008, and 150 billion pages in March 2010.

In late 1999, the Internet Archive also became an online library of text, audio, software, image and video content, for example some books of the Million Book Project (10,520 books in April 2005), films for the period 1903-1973, live concerts, software, sites about September 11, sites about elections, and sites about the web pioneers, with all collections freely available on the web.

As a side remark, the Million Book Project, also called the Universal Library or Universal Digital Library (UDL), was launched in January 2000 by the Carnegie Mellon University (Pennsylvania) with the aim to digitize one million books in a number of languages, including in libraries from 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 three mirror sites (India, Northern China, Southern China).

In October 2005, the Internet Archive launched the Open Content Alliance (OCA) as a group of cultural, technology, non profit, and governmental organizations, with the aim to build a world public permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. The OCA started to digitize public domain books around the world, and to include them in the collection of the Internet Archive.

1996 > LIBRARIES LAUNCHED WEBSITES

[Summary] The Helsinki City Library in Finland was the first library to launch a website, which went live in February 1994. Two years later, more and more libraries started their own websites as a virtual window for their patrons and beyond. Patrons could check opening hours, browse the online catalog, and surf a broad selection of websites on various topics. Libraries developed digital libraries alongside their standard collections, so that anyone could access their specialized, old, local and regional collections, including for images and sound. Librarians could finally fulfill two goals that used to be in contradiction: preservation (on shelves) and communication (on the internet). Debates were fierce about the assets of the print book versus the digital book, and vice versa.

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In the mid-1990s, libraries started their own websites as a virtual window for their patrons and beyond, with an online catalog and a digital library.

In his book “Books in My Life”, published by the Library of Congress in 1985, Robert Downs, a librarian, wrote: "My lifelong love affair with books and reading continues unaffected by automation, computers, and all other forms of the twentieth-century gadgetry."

Automation and computers were followed by the internet (1974) and the web (1990), and eased the work of librarians in some way.

The Helsinki City Library in Finland was the first library to launch a website, which went live in February 1994. Other libraries started their own websites as a virtual window for their patrons and beyond. Patrons could check opening hours, browse the online catalog, and surf on a broad selection of websites on various topics.

Libraries also developed digital libraries alongside their standard collections, so that anyone could access their specialized, old, local and regional collections, including for images and sound. Librarians could finally fulfill two goals that used to be in contradiction: preservation (on shelves) and communication (on the internet). People could now leaf through digital facsimiles, and access the original books only if necessary.