rocketbook

Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning created the very first e-reader in 1997, the Rocketbook. They were lifelong voracious readers and saw a future where everyone was reading digital books. A prototype was quickly developed and pitched to Jeff Bezos at Amazon, but they took a pass because the device needed to be plugged into a computer to download books. A few days later they took a meeting with Barnes and Noble and a deal was closed within a week, the bookseller owned 50% of the company. In the first year, 20,000 Rocketbook e-readers were sold. A few years later the e-reader was discontinued, this is the story of the first e-reader. In 1997 the tech world was a very different place. The Palm Pilot reigned supreme and Blackberry hadn’t even released a phone yet. People had been reading PDF files and various other kinds of ebooks on their computers for years, but there was no handheld ebook reader on the market. This prompted Eberhard and Tarpenning to form a new company called NuvoMedia and try and get some investment capital to make something happen. Since even E-Ink wasn’t around yet, they had to use transflective LCD screen. The device weighed a little over a pound, heavy by today’s standards, but it could be held with one hand, like a paperback book, and its battery lasted twenty hours with the backlight on, which compares favorably to today’s mobile devices. In the book by Brad Stone, the Everything Store, he talks about the following “In late 1997, the NuvoMedia founders and their lawyer took a Rocketbook prototype to Seattle and spent three weeks in negotiations with Bezos and his top executives. Bezos “was really intrigued by our device,” Eberhard says. “He understood that the display technology was finally good enough.”