Electronic publishers are able to respond quickly to changing market demand, because the companies do not have to order printed books and have them delivered.
[7] The first digitization initiative was in 1971 by Michael S. Hart, a student at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who launched Project Gutenberg,[8] designed to make literature more accessible to everyone, through the internet.
But with the appearance of the Web 1.0 in 1991 and its ability to connect documents together through static pages, the project moved quickly forward.
[9] In the 1970s, the French National Centre for Scientific Research digitized a thousand books from diverse subjects, mostly literature but also philosophy and science, dating back to the 12th century to present times.
In this way were built the foundations of a large dictionary, the Trésor de la langue française au Québec.
[10] In 1974, American inventor and futurist Raymond Kurzweil developed a scanner which was equipped with an Omnifont software that enabled optical character recognition for numeric inputs.
[citation needed] The ABU (Association des Bibliophiles Universels), was a public digital library project created by the Cnam in 1993.
The president François Mitterrand had wanted since 1988 to create a new and innovative digital library, and it was published in 1997 under the name of Gallica.
[18] In the same year, HathiTrust was created to put together the contents of many university e-libraries from USA and Europe, as well as Google Books and Internet Archive.
Alain Mille, in the book Pratiques de l'édition numérique (edited by Michael E. Sinatra and Marcello Vitali-Rosati),[20] says that the beginnings of Internet and the Web are the very core of electronic publishing, since they pretty much determined the biggest changes in the production and diffusion patterns.
Internet has a direct effect on the publishing questions, letting creators and users go further in the traditional process (writer-editor-publishing house).
Blogs and comment systems are also now renown as online edition and publishing, since it is possible through new interactions between the author and its readers, and can be an important method for inspiration but also for visibility.
The consumer may read the published content online on a website, in an application on a tablet device, or in a PDF document on a computer.
Distributing content electronically as software applications ("apps") has become popular in the 2010s, due to the rapid consumer adoption of smartphones and tablets.
With the use of tags, style sheets, and metadata, this enables "reflowable" content that adapts to various reading devices (tablet, smartphone, e-reader, etc.)
Another common format is .folio, which is used by the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite to create content for Apple's iPad tablets and apps.
In some fields, such as astronomy and some areas of physics, the role of the journal in disseminating the latest research has largely been replaced by preprint repositories such as arXiv.org.