Every year, approximately 170-200 million ebooks are sold, and this figure really shouldn’t be surprising to anyone. After all, people have been moving towards ebooks and away from printed media ever since these electronic books began to be sold online way back in the early 1990s.

And it’s pretty easy to see why electronic books are so popular and continue to become more popular with each passing year. They’re easy to buy, easy to read, and can be carried anywhere thanks to our phones, Kindles, tablets, or other types of electronic devices. They have become so popular that a holiday has even been created in their honor. This holiday is known as Read an Ebook Day and it’s observed annually on September 18th.

The History of Read an Ebook Day

Many articles that go into detail about the history of ebooks will start back in 1949 when Angela Ruiz Robles, a Spanish teacher, invented the first automated book reader. Although we could start there, we thought it would be more appropriate to jump to the early 1970s when the first actual electronic book was invented.

No offense to Robles, whose invention can now be found at the National Museum of Science and Technology in A Coruña. We don’t think it’s an electronic book. In 1971, Michael S. Hart, a student at the University of Illinois, invented the first ebook with a Xerox mainframe computer in a university lab.

It was the U.S. Declaration of Independence, which made it more like a pamphlet than a book, but we contend that it still counts. Approximately 22 years later, in 1993, the first ebooks began to be sold on the newly minted World Wide Web. And the rest, as they so commonly say, is history.

In 2014, the first observance of Read an Ebook Day was debuted to the public by the ebook distributor OverDrive. It is a holiday that has since been observed every year, and in fact, is becoming more popular as time goes by.

Observing Read an Ebook Day

Purchasing and reading ebooks are the main ways for people to observe this holiday, but it doesn’t have to be the only way. People can also find free ebooks online on sites such as Project Gutenberg.

Other ways for people to observe this holiday include sharing their love of ebooks with friends and family members, coworkers, and people on the Internet using the hashtag #ReadAnEbookDay. Let’s all take the time to enjoy these electronic books and share that love of them with the people in our lives. Reading is still as important as it ever was; it’s just changed formats.