Many publishers are reluctant to produce ebooks over fears of piracy and it wasn't until the 21st century that many publishers considered it a worthwhile forum, despite some earlier successes such as the 1988 ebook of William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive[?], and Stephen King's Riding the Bullet, which garnered half a million downloads when it was released on March 14, 2000 (only the first part of the book was free, and King gave up when he couldn't get enough people to pay for the remaining parts).
The lack of legitimate ebooks led to rapid growth of the number of unlicensed ebooks being produced, a growth which still continues - most significantly in the genres of science fiction and fantasy. This had resulted in the number of unlicensed ebooks to outweigh the licensed ebooks by several orders of magnitude.
Recent attempts to revive ebooks include ExeBook (http://www.exebook.com), an ebook compiler that produces an exe file that, when executed, produces a simulated book onscreen, complete with page texture. The etext is encrypted as graphic images so that automatic text copying is very difficult. The fear of exe files picking up viruses, however, is hampering acceptance.
See also: e-text, digital library, Project Gutenberg
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