E-book

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please improve this article if you can. (March 2008)
A user viewing an electronic page on an eBook reading device
A user viewing an electronic page on an eBook reading device

An e-book (for electronic book: also ebook: also ecobook) is the digital media equivalent of a conventional printed book. Such documents are usually read on personal computers, or on dedicated hardware devices known as e-book readers or e-book devices.

An e-book is a specialised type of e-text.

Contents

[edit] History

 The tone or style of this article or section may not be appropriate for Wikipedia.
Specific concerns may be found on the talk page. See Wikipedia's guide to writing better articles for suggestions.(April 2008)

In 1971 Michael Hart was handed a real boon--$100,000.00 worth of computer time with a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer. He decided that the greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries. The first "e-book" was born--a copy of the Declaration of Independence. Those humble beginnings would become Project Gutenberg. Today Project Gutenberg houses 20,000 free texts and over 100,000 books are available through their partners. Over 3,000,000 books are downloaded each month.

E-books appeared on the web, easily shared and stored on a hard drive or storage disk, and quickly began to proliferate.

Early e-books were generally written in specialty areas, intended to be documents that only small groups might share, and therefore were few and far between. Their subject matter ranged from technical manuals for cutting-edge hardware and manufacturing techniques to material "not suited for minors", and everywhere in-between.

This fractured market of independents and specialty authors created a lack of consensus on the best way to package, sell, or read e-books.

Numerous e-book formats emerged and proliferated, some supported by major software companies, like Adobe's PDF format, and others supported by independent and open-source programmers. Multiple readers naturally followed multiple formats, most of them specializing in only one format, and thereby fragmenting the e-book market even more. The result was a lack of an overriding voice with the public regarding e-books, which kept e-books from becoming a mainstream product.

E-books continued to gain in their own underground markets. Many e-book publishers began distributing books that were in the public domain, or that were simply old and hard-to-find. At the same time, authors with books that were not accepted by their publisher began to strike out on their own, offering the books online so they could be seen by others. Unofficial, and occasionally unauthorized, catalogs of books became available over the web, and sites devoted to e-books began spreading the word to the public.

One of the first genres to become successful in the e-book field was that of the romance story. Romance novels were perfect for e-books, the genre already considered a "guilty pleasure" by most of the public, due to its oft-ridiculed and notoriously salacious content. E-book romances were easy to shop for and buy from the privacy of your home, and just as easy to read without revealing your guilty pleasure to others. Unbeknownst to the rest of the world, romance e-books had become a quiet success.

With all of this activity by major publishers and electronics companies alongside independents, new selling models are being developed, formats are beginning to homogenize, dedicated reading hardware is now available, and e-books are achieving global distribution. E-books have spawned new e-publishing houses, electronics manufacturers are releasing more e-book readers designed for the masses, and software designers are creating new reader applications for portable electronics gear like handheld computers, smartphones and game consoles. Sony has recently introduced a popular portable reader, and Amazon.com has begun selling its Kindle model.

The public, largely ignorant of e-books in the twentieth century, now see fellow commuters reading e-books on laptops around campus, on handheld computers at the coffee shop and on cellphones during their commute. In Japan, sales of mobile-phone novels—-books that you download and read, usually in instalments, on the screen of your cell phone—-have jumped from nothing five years ago to over ¥10 billion ($82m) a year today (The Economist)

Consumers can now find more of the kind of literature they want to read, from best-sellers by established authors, to cutting-edge material by daring new authors, and everything in-between.

[edit] Formats

Main article: Comparison of e-book formats

A writer or publisher has many options when it comes to choosing a file format for production.

[edit] Advantages

Text can be searched automatically, and cross-referenced using hyperlinks. This makes e-books an excellent choice of format for works that benefit from search and cross-reference capabilities, such as dictionaries, reference works, and certain kinds of textbooks.

Less physical space is required to store e-books. Hundreds (or thousands) may be carried together on one device. Approximately 500 average e-books can be stored on one CD (equivalent to several shelves of print books). Because they take up little space, e-books can be offered indefinitely, with no 'out of print' date, allowing authors to continue to earn royalties indefinitely (copyright law permitting) and allowing readers to find older works.

Readers who have difficulty reading print books can benefit from the adjustment of text size and font face. Text-to-speech software can be used to automatically convert e-books to audio books. In addition, some e-books devices allow reading in low light or even total darkness, with a back-lit device.

An ebook may be more comfortable for some to hold because it does not need to be held open like a paperback. It can also be set down and read hands-free.

It costs little to reproduce an e-book. Copies can be made instantly and in as great a quantity as desired. This makes it easy to retain backups and difficult to eliminate works once they have been distributed. From the publisher's point of view, the ease of distributing e-texts means that they can be used to stimulate higher sales of printed copies of books.[1]

With Internet access becoming ubiquitous in industrial nations, the ease of distributing e-books is a considerable advantage. E-books cost little to transfer, and such an operation occurs quickly. Readers can begin reading as soon as the download completes, or sooner, depending on the e-book formats' capabilities, without the need to visit a bookstore.

Although they require electricity to be read, the production of e-books does not consume the paper, ink, and other resources that are used to produce print books.

Books in electronic form are usually cheaper than same books on paper, and some are free.

An electronic book can be downloaded in seconds or minutes, while sending a paper book takes days or weeks.

Some books exist only in electronic form.

Ebooks can in theory be updated wiki-style, thus keeping a record of changes, as well as having the most up to date version.

[edit] Disadvantages

An e-book requires an electronic device to display it. Many e-book formats require special software to display them, which may not be freely available or compatible with a reader's existing computing device. As an e-book is dependent on equipment to be read, it can be affected by faults in external hardware or software, such as hard disk drive failure.

  • All e-book devices require power.
  • There is always a concern that the book format will not be readable by future e-book devices.
  • Book reading devices are significantly more expensive than most paper books.
  • Book readers are more likely to be stolen than paper books.
  • Paper books are less fragile than book readers. You can sit on a book, jump on it, drop it from a height, and it still remains readable. However, the pages of paper books are subject to ripping. Both varieties of books suffer from potential liquid damage (eg. spills, submersion etc.)

If an e-book device is stolen, lost, or broken beyond repair, the replacement cost is often substantially more than that of a traditional book. In addition, all e-books stored on the device are lost along with it.

Anti-circumvention techniques may be used to restrict what the user may do with an e-book. For instance, it may not be possible to transfer ownership of an e-book to another person, though such a transaction is common with physical books. Some can phone home to track readers and reading habits, restrict printing, or arbitrarily modify reading material. This includes restricting the copying and distribution of works in the public domain through the use of "click-wrap" licensing, effectively limiting the rights of the public to freely distribute, sell or use texts in the public domain.

Unfortunately most e-book publishers do not warn their customers about the possible consequences of the Digital rights management scheme on their books. Generally they claim that Digital rights management is meant to prevent copying of the e-book. However in many cases it is also possible that Digital rights management will result in the complete denial of access by the purchaser to the e-book. With some formats of DRM, the e-book is tied to a specific computer or device. In these cases the DRM will usually let the purchaser move the book a limited number of times, after which they cannot use it on any additional devices. If the purchaser upgrades or replaces their devices, which they will do over time, eventually they will lose access to their purchase. Some forms of Digital rights management depend on the existence of online services to authenticate the purchasers. If the company that provides the service goes out of business or decides to stop providing the service, the purchaser will no longer be able to access the e-book.

With Digital rights management, it is more apt to consider the exchange of money for commodity to be a rental or lease rather than a purchase. The restricted book comes with a number of restrictions, and eventually access to the purchase can be removed by a number of different parties involved. These include the publisher of the book, the publisher of the DRM scheme, and the publisher of the reader software. These are all things that are significantly different from the realm of experiences anyone has had with a physical copy of the book.

Screen resolution is lower than paper, for instance the screen resolution of Amazon Kindle is 167 ppi versus 600-2400 ppi for a typical laser printer.

Some older e-book devices cannot be viewed in bright sunlight, but this problem does not exist for modern e-book devices that use e-ink technology.

From a publisher's point of view, e-books can in some cases be hacked, or disseminated without approval from the author or publisher. The ease with which an electronic document may be copied means that a single unprotected document may be used to replicate an unlimited number of perfect copies.

[edit] Production

Some e-books are produced simultaneously with the production of a printed format, as described in electronic publishing, though in many instances they may not be put on sale until later. Often, e-books are produced from pre-existing hard-copy books, generally by document scanning, sometimes with the use of robotic book scanners, having the technology to quickly scan books without damaging the original print edition. Scanning a book produces an image file, which must then be converted into text format by an OCR program.[2] Occasionally, as in some e-text projects, a book may be produced by re-entering the text from a keyboard.

As a newer development, sometimes only the electronic version of a book is produced by the publisher. Usually, it is possible to convert electronic book to a printed book by print on demand.

E-book publishing as an industry is growing in the double digits yearly, according to the quarterly reports put out by IDPF. Among the first Internet-only publishers of new e-books were Boson Books, Hard Shell Word Factory and Online Originals, all founded in the mid-1990s. Each pioneered different aspects of what has since become common practice amongst e-book publishers, e.g. the support of multiple formats including PDFs, the payment of much higher royalty rates than conventional publishers, and the online presentation of free samples. Hard Shell Word Factory set the first professional standards for commercial e-books and pioneered author-friendly contracts. Online Originals was the first e-book publisher to win mainstream book reviews (in The Times) and a nomination for a major literary prize (the Booker Prize).

Since the late 1990s, the many newcomers to e-book publishing have included most major print publishers. At the same time, many established e-publishers started to offer print versions of some of their titles. Thus the line between the two is fast blurring.

There are some parts of the industry where there are particularly notable leading firms. In the general field of science-fiction and fantasy, Baen Books, an American publishing company established in 1983 by science fiction publishing industry long-timer Jim Baen (1943-2006) has a well-established position. It is a science fiction and fantasy publishing house that specializes in space opera/military science fiction and fantasy (though it does not restrict itself to these subgenres). It is notable for releasing books without DRM in a variety of formats, before hard-copy publication, and pre-releasing ebooks in parts before the hard-copy release. Many older titles are available for free, especially the first book in a series.

E-books have their own bestseller lists, including those compiled by IDPF, BooksOnBoard and Fictionwise. There are two yearly awards for excellence in e-books. The longest-standing and most inclusive of these is the EPPIE award, given by EPIC since 2000. The other is the Dream Realm Award, first awarded to speculative fiction e-books in 2002.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Giving It Away - Forbes.com
  2. ^ The Book Standard is closed

[edit] References