The birth of the ebook told by someone who was there

A fascinating article about the birth of the ebook from TidBITS.  Here’s a snippet:

… the Voyager Company, a small video and digital media company housed in a condemned building just north of Santa Monica Pier on Pacific Coast Highway, held a private meeting to which various scholars and academics were invited. Voyager had recently received a great deal of attention for developing one of the first commercial CD-ROM publications, a CD audio recording of Beethoven’s Symphony #9 and an accompanying HyperCard stack on floppy disk that synchronized the performance with a detailed and lively discussion of the work by UCLA professor Robert Winter. Now Bob Stein, the president of the Voyager Company, wondered if it was possible to do for classic literature what Winter’s “CD Companion” had done for classical music….

I remember that meeting only dimly, but I do recall that it was a wide-ranging, sometimes heated, discussion about whether or not anyone would ever want to read from a computer screen instead of from a printed page. The consensus finally reached was that the only way a computer-based reading experience would be even remotely attractive would be if the software compensated for the inconvenience and limitations of the then-current computer and display technologies by providing a lot of “extras” — deep and plentiful annotations, search capabilities, linked ancillary materials, animated illustrations, and so on. …

Even as we worked on refining the feature set of the Expanded Books, my job was to painstakingly copy the text of each of these books into a HyperCard stack, a process we called “flowing the text.” This included hand-adjusting the spacing between words, adding in clickable notes (an epic endeavor in the case of Martin’s books), and even producing some of the special effects. I remember spending a day or two writing the HyperCard scripts that would make John Tenniel’s Cheshire Cat illustration in “Through the Looking Glass” dissolve in and out on the digital page and another day recording dinosaur sounds with an audio engineer (the tyrannosaurus in “Jurassic Park” was a lion’s roar mixed with an industrial vacuum cleaner).

Thanks to Howard for the link.