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Beginnings of digitization
The first digitization initiative was in 1971 in the United States, by Michael S. Hart. He was a student at the University of Illinois, and decided to launch the Project Gutenberg. The project was about making literature more accessible to everyone, through internet. It took a while to develop, and in 1989 there were only 10 texts that were manually recopied on computer by Michael S. Hart himself and some volunteers. 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. Many more volunteers helped developing the project by giving access to public domain classics.

In the 1970's, CNRS digitized 1 000 books from diverse subjects, mostly literature but also philosophy and science, from the 1180's to present times, as to build the foundations of a big dictionary, the Trésor de la langue Française. This foundation of e-texts, named Frantext, was first published on CD under the name of Discotext, and then published on the web in 1998. The Frantext is always enhanced, and in 2016 they registered 4 516 texts.

Beginnings of mass-scale digitization
In 1974, Raymond Kurzweil developed a scanner that was equipped with an Omnifont software that enabled optical character recognition for numeric inputs. The digitization projects could then be a lot more ambitious since the time needed for digitization decreased considerably, and digital libraries are be on the rise. All over the world, e-libraries start to emerge.

The ABU (Association des Bibliophiles Universels), was a public digital library project created by the Cnam in 1993. It was the first french digital library in the network; suspended since 2002, they reproduced over a hundred texts that are still available.

In 1992, the Bibliothèque nationale de France launched a vast digitization program. The president François Mitterrand wanted since 1988 to create a new and innovative digital library, and it was published in 1997 under the name of Gallica. In 2014, the digital library was offering 80 255 online books and over a million documents, including prints and manuscripts.

In 2003, Wikisource was launched, and the project aspired to constitute a digital and multilingual library that would be a complement to the Wikipedia project. It was originally named "Project Sourceberg", as a word play to remind the Project Gutenberg. Supported by the Wikimedia Foundation, Wikisource proposes digitized texts that have been verified by volunteers.

In December 2004, Google created Google Books, a project to digitize all the books available in the word (over 130 million books) to make them accessible online. 10 years later, 25 000 000 books, from a hundred countries and in 400 languages, are on the platform. This was possible because at this time, robotic scanners can digitize around 6 000 books per hour.

In 2008, the prototype of Europeana was launched; and by 2010, the project had been giving access to over 10 million digital objects. The Europeana library is an european catalog that offers index cards on millions of digital objects and links to their digital libraries. On 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. In 2016, over six millions of users had ben using HathiTrust.

Beginnings of electronic publishing
The first digitization projects were transferring physical content into digital content. Electronic publishing is aiming to integrate the whole process of editing and publishing (production, layout, publication) in the digital world.

Alain Mille, in the book Pratiques de l'édition numérique (edited by Michael E. Sinatra and Marcello Vitali-Rosati), 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).

The traditional publishing, and especially the creation part, were first revolutionized by new desktop publishing softwares appearing in the 1980's, and by the text databases created for the encyclopedias and directories. At the same time the multimedia was developing quickly, combining book, audiovisual and computer science characteristics. CDs and DVDs appear, permitting the visualization of these dictionaries and encyclopedias on computers.

The arrival and democratization of Internet is slowly giving small publishing houses the opportunity to publish their books directly online. Some websites, like Amazon, let their users buy eBooks; Internet users can also find many educative platforms (free or not), encyclopedic websites like Wikipedia, and even digital magazines platforms. The eBook then becomes more and more accessible through many different supports, like the e-reader and even smartphones. The digital book had, and still has, an important impact on publishing houses and their economical models; it is still a moving domain, and they yet have to master the new ways of publishing in a digital era.

Online edition
Based on new communications practices of the web 2.0 and the new architecture of participation, online edition opens the door to a collaboration of a community to elaborate and improve contents on Internet, while also enriching reading through collective reading practices. The web 2.0 not only links documents together, as did the web 1.0, it also links people together through social media: that's why it's called the Participative (or participatory) Web.

Many tools were put in place to foster sharing and creative collective contents. One of the many is the Wikipedia encyclopedia, since it is edited, corrected and enhanced by millions of contributors. Open Street Map is also based on the same principle. Blogs and comment systems are also now reknown 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.