The Rocket eBook is an early commercial handheld e-reader that was produced by NuvoMedia in late 1998; it uses a LCD screen and can store up to ten e-books. E-books are loaded on the device by connecting it to a computer, and the device has two page turn buttons. Rocket-compatible e-books were sold online at Barnes & Noble and Powell's Bookstore. It had a retail price of $499.
The Rocket eBook was manufactured by NuvoMedia until 2000, when it was purchased by Gemstar-TV Guide International for $187 million. After purchasing NuvoMedia and merging it with SoftBook, Gemstar released an e-reader called the RCA eBook Reader.
NuvoMedia
On April 15, 1997, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded NuvoMedia to make a product that could benefit from improving battery size and settled on designing an electronic book reader; the resulting Rocket eBook e-reader sold 20,000 units in 1999.6
External links
- "The Tale of Rocketbook – The very first e-reader", Good E-Reader, 2018
References
eBooks: 1998 – The first ebook readers. Retrieved 5 February 2015. http://www.gutenbergnews.org/20110716/ebooks-1998-the-first-ebook-readers/ ↩
Kozlowski, Michael (2 December 2018). "The Tale of Rocketbook – The very first e-reader". goodereader.com. Retrieved 2018-12-14. https://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/the-tale-of-rocketbook-the-very-first-e-reader ↩
David Strom. "E-Books: Still an Unfinished Work". Computerworld, Jul 19, 1999. p. 76. https://books.google.com/books?id=r6fVZ4hOrzcC&pg=PA76 ↩
Hossein Bidgoli. The Internet Encyclopedia. John Wiley and Sons, 2004. p. 790. ISBN 978-0-471-22202-6 https://books.google.com/books?id=96ZSgSIdbH4C&pg=PA790 ↩
Hossein Bidgoli. The Internet Encyclopedia. John Wiley and Sons, 2004. p. 790. ISBN 978-0-471-22202-6 https://books.google.com/books?id=96ZSgSIdbH4C&pg=PA790 ↩
Baer, Drake. "The Making Of Tesla: Invention, Betrayal, And The Birth Of The Roadster". Business Insider. Retrieved 7 June 2016. http://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-the-origin-story-2014-10 ↩