er I just do it as a spare-time volunteer." (excerpt from a NEF
interview, September 1998)

Here is the journey we are going to follow:

1968: ASCII is a 7-bit coded character set.
1971: Project Gutenberg is the first digital library.
1974: The internet takes off.
1977: UNIMARC is set up as a common bibliographic format.
1984: Copyleft is a new license for computer software.
1990: The web takes off.
1991: Unicode is a universal double-byte character set.
1993: The Online Books Page is a list of free eBooks.
1993: The PDF format is launched by Adobe.
1994: The first library website goes online.
1994: Publishers put some of their books online for free.
1995: Amazon.com is the first main online bookstore.
1995: The mainstream press goes online.
1996: The Palm Pilot is the first PDA.
1996: The Internet Archive is founded to archive the web.
1996: Teachers explore new ways of teaching.
1997: Online publishing begins spreading.
1997: The Logos Dictionary goes online for free.
1997: Multimedia convergence is the topic of an international
symposium.
1998: Library treasures like Beowulf go online.
1999: Librarians become webmasters.
1998: The web becomes multilingual.
1999: The Open eBook format is a standard for eBooks.
1999: Authors go digital.
2000: yourDictionary.com is a language portal.
2000: The Bible of Gutenberg goes online.
2000: Distributed Proofreaders digitizes books from public domain.
2000: The Public Library of Science (PLoS) works on free online
journals.
2001: Wikipedia is the first main online cooperative encyclopedia.
2001: Creative Commons works on new ways to respect authors' rights on
the web.
2003: MIT offers its course materials for free in its OpenCourseWare.
2004: Project Gutenberg Europe is launched as a multilingual project.
2004: Google launches Google Print to rename it Google Books.
2005: The Open Content Alliance (OCA) launches a world public digital
library.
2006: Microsoft launches Live Search Books as its own digital library.
2006: The union catalog WorldCat goes online for free.
2007: Citizendium is a main online "reliable" cooperative encyclopedia.
2007: The Encyclopedia of Life will document all species of animals and
plants.

[Unless specified otherwise, all quotations are excerpts from NEF
interviews. These interviews are available online at
<http://www.etudes-