March 2000, Numilog was founded by Denis Zwirn near Paris,
France, as a company specializing in the distribution of
digital books. Numilog launched in September 2000 an online
bookstore that became the main French-speaking aggregator of
digital books over the years. Numilog has sold books and
audiobooks in partnership with a number of publishers,
including Gallimard, POL, Le Dilettante, Le Rocher, La
Decouverte, De Vive Voix, Eyrolles or Pearson Education France.
Numilog was bought in May 2008 by Hachette Livre, a leading
publishing group.

= Adobe Reader

Adobe launched PDF (Portable Document Format) in June 1993,
with Acrobat Reader (free, to read PDF documents) and Adobe
Acrobat (for a fee, to make PDF documents). As the "veteran"
format, PDF was perfected over the years as a global standard
for distribution and viewing of information. It "lets you
capture and view robust information from any application, on
any computer system and share it with anyone around the world.
Individuals, businesses, and government agencies everywhere
trust and rely on Adobe PDF to communicate their ideas and
vision" (excerpt from the website). Adobe Acrobat gave the
tools to create and view PDF files, in several languages and
for several platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux).

In August 2000, Adobe bought Glassbook, a company specializing
in digital books software for publishers, booksellers,
distributors and libraries. Adobe also partnered with
Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com to offer ebooks for the
Acrobat Reader and the Glassbook Reader.

In January 2001, Adobe launched the Acrobat eBook Reader (free)
and the Adobe Content Server (for a fee).

The Acrobat eBook Reader was used to read PDF files of
copyrighted books, while adding notes and bookmarks, getting
the book covers in a personal library, and browsing a
dictionary.

The Adobe Content Server was intended for publishers and
distributors for the packaging, protection, distribution and
sale of copyrighted books in PDF format, while managing their
access with DRM (Digital Rights Management), according to
instructions given by the copyright holder, for example
allowing or not the printing and loan of ebooks. (It was
replaced with the Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server in November
2004.)

In April 2001, Adobe partnered with Amazon.com, for the online
bookstore to include 2,000 copyrighted books for the Acrobat
eBook Reader. These were titles of major publishers, travel
guides,