[1] VitalSource has offices in Raleigh, North Carolina; Boston, Massachusetts; San Francisco, California; Seattle, Washington; as well as in England and Australia.

[2] As a faculty member at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio in the early 1990s, Watkins' research projects focused on the impact of technology on teaching and learning.

Several medical publishers, including Williams & Wilkins and Little-Brown, provided content licenses and financial grants for digital inclusion of their books in the system.

John Littlefield, Janise Richards, and Spencer Redding provided early educational, technological, and academic guidance for the fledgeling project.

During this early period, business was supported by a small group of angel investors and by SATEX Investment Partners, run by Danny Mills.

In 1999, the team relocated to Raleigh, North Carolina, where the company added backing from a group of investors led by Frank Daniels III.

The company's first commercial implementations kicked off in 2000 when the small group of dental schools piloted the use of an early course materials solution—DVDs that held full digital versions of each student's entire four years of textbooks, workbooks, lecture slides, manuals, and handbooks.

However, in the early 2000s, as interest grew in its dental school offerings, the company added business by white-labelling versions of its software for publishers—initially for Elsevier Health in the nursing market with a product called Evolve Select.

[4] During the same early period, VitalSource launched a partnership with the PC division of IBM (later carried over to Lenovo) pre-loading large sets of organized, searchable, royalty-free content on laptops destined for education markets worldwide.

[7] Before the end of the decade, VitalSource had moved beyond health sciences and was powering the world's first fully integrated, campus-wide e-textbook programs for EDMC and DeVry University.