About Alexandria Digital Literature

Alexandria Digital Literature's been around a long time. Please bear with us as we relate a bit of history.

In the mid 1980's, company founder (and voracious reader) Dave Howell first had an idea for how to find more good stuff to read; an idea that seemed impractical until the creation and growth of the World Wide Web. In 1996, Dave launched AlexLit.com, and started developing what would become the world's first collaborative-filter-based reading recommender. At the same time, editors began acquiring e-publishing rights to fiction (especially shorter fiction) from authors.

The website went live in the fall of 1996, the recommending engine was switched on for the public in February 1997, and the first titles in AlexLit’s digital literature catalog went on sale in spring ’98. By the time the first commercially available eBook reading devices became available that fall, AlexLit had a substantial catalog of digital literature for sale in multiple formats.

In 1999, e-commerce pioneer Ted Treanor joined the company as President, and AlexLit acquired fellow e-literature pioneer Mind's Eye Fiction (also known as Tale.com). The company had nearly one thousand works of fiction under contract. At first, these stories were only available at the AlexLit or Tale.com websites, but as ebook readers from companies like Microsoft and Franklin were launched, established companies like Amazon.com, Palm, and Barnes & Noble started selling digital literature, and newcomers like Fictionwise and MobiPocket arrived on the scene, AlexLit started deploying titles through wholesale channels as well.

Processing all that material was pretty time-consuming. AlexLit focused on reprints, bringing back into "print" previously published works that were now unavailable. Most of these works were only available in printed form or an unedited digital form from the author, so preparing a manuscript for publishing online was fairly labor intensive. And once a manuscript was in digital form, it then had to be processed into the various different e-reader formats.

To overcome this issue, AlexLit developed an automatic conversion engine dubbed the RosettaMachine™: stories were stored in a 'master' format; when a customer bought a story, they chose what format they wanted it in, and their personal edition was prepared on-the-fly, ready to download in just a few seconds. In this way AlexLit was able to offer the widest selection of formats of anyone in the industry.

2000-Present

In 2000, the company board recapitalized and founded Rosetta Solutions which assumed the assets of Alexandria Digital Literature. The energized company upgraded the RosettaMachine and added digital distribution services for ebooks, providing services to forward-thinking large New York publishing houses that recognized the potential of e-books and wanted to work with an established, experienced partner instead of bringing the process in-house. Despite such industry validation, market adoption of ebooks, though steadily growing, was slow; Rosetta was still ahead of its time.

One year later, the stock market "adjusted," and funding for Internet companies began to dry up. Many of Rosetta's competitors and peers closed or went bankrupt. Rosetta itself had to drastically change course to avoid being a casualty. The AlexLit division stopped acquiring new titles, and many staff positions were eliminated.

Company management focused on providing more services to the publishing industry itself. Although Rosetta was actually continuing to break new ground in digital publishing by expanding the available conversion formats, participating in setting industry standards, developing and launching new services for publishers, and serving a growing customer base, financial and human investment in the AlexLit.com website was deliberately slowed.

Nevertheless, staff members continued to maintain the site. Not only did they believe that AlexLit.com, and especially Hypatia, the recommending engine, was worth keeping, but so did the patrons who'd come to rely on Hypatia's uncannily accurate recommendations.

Today, with the healthy and continued growth of digital content, ebooks and online reading and the simultaneous groundswell of interest in social networking sites, the AlexLit and Hypatia concepts are ones whose time has come. Rosetta Solutions’ growing client base is testament to the now acknowledged critical importance of digital publishing services to each publishing organization. Plans are now under development for 2008 to upgrade and revitalize the AlexLit.com site and open the doors of the Hypatia community to a wider audience. We believe new discerning readers will be as delighted by the services as past users have been.

The Original Library of Alexandria

Alexandria Digital Literature is inspired by the Great Museum and libraries of Alexandria, Egypt. As legend has it, the ancient Library of Alexandria contained the greatest collection of knowledge (in the form of scrolls) of that age. The collection was created from the ambition of Ptolemy I to possess all known world literature. He collected and catalogued more than 500,000 "scrolls" containing the great written works of ancient times.