Sumerians use cuneiform alphabet, pressed in clay with a triangular stylus. Clay tablets were dried and/or fired for longevity. Some even had clay envelopes, which were also inscribed. Some consider them to be the earliest form of the book.

Date of the earliest surviving papyrus scroll with writing.

The earliest known movable type machine is created in China.

Gutenberg printed his 42-line Bible in Mainz on the first printing press. He also used a quality of handmade paper which remains unsurpassed to this day.

Color printing first appears.

The first facsimile edition by Plantin, 16th century Martyrologium Hieronymianum (engraved on copper plates).

Library of Congress founded in Washington D.C.

First paperbacks by Tauchnitz Verlag Germany.

Christopher Sholes invents the typewriter, which is marketed by Remington.

Nazis initiate a campaign of book burning.

Futurist Vannavar Bush dreams of a "Memex," which allows an individual to store all his books, records, and communications, and is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged supplement to his memory. His vision will result in developments leading to the World Wide Web.

Ted Nelson coins the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" for non-sequential writings and branching presentations of all types.

Postgraduate student Alan Kay develops the idea for DynaBook, a portable, interactive personal computer, as accessible as a book.

A movement that began at the Illinois Benedictine College aimed at collecting as many texts as possible in electronic format. Now freely available over the Internet, the texts range from simple works in the public domain to larger, copyrighted books.

Introduced by IBM, the chip served as the foundation of the Data Encryption Standard, an algorithm used by the government and industry in order to encrypt important data and phone conversations.

Ink-jet printing announced by IBM.

Theorynet is created at the University of Wisconsin, providing electronic mail to over 100 researchers in computer science.

IBM introduces the Personal Computer.

Ted Nelson forms the Xanadu team, who plan on creating a "connected literature" of richly formatted text and images accessible cheaply, reliably, and securely from anywhere in the world.

The pop-up book, "The Human Body," is printed by Viking Press.

Parke Lightbown builds a computer application that runs from a computer-based version of the compact disc, previously used exclusively for music recordings. He also instigates a standards effort among the major industry players.

Macintosh computers are introduced into the marketplace and with it the field of desktop publishing.

An online magazine featuring short science fiction and fantasy stories arises on BITNET from the University of Maine. Renamed DargonZine in 1988, FSFnet was posted on AOL and Delphi in 1994, and uploaded to the Internet in 1995. After fourteen years, it remains the oldest electronic magazine in publication.

WWW developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, Geneva, Switzerland.

NuvoMedia enters the publishing world with the Rocket eBook Publishing System.