E-book

An electronic book (variously: e-book, eBook, e-Book, ebook, digital book or e-edition) is a book-publication in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on computers or other electronic devices.^[1] Although sometimes defined as "an electronic version of a printed book",^[2] many e-books exist without any printed equivalent. Commercially produced and sold e-books are usually intended to be read on dedicated e-readers. However, almost any sophisticated electronic device that features a controllable viewing screen, including computers, tablets and smartphones can also be used to read e-books.

E-book reading is increasing in the US; by 2014 28% of adults had read an e-book, compared to 23% in 2013. This is increasing because 50% of American adults by 2014 had a dedicated device, either an e-reader or a tablet, compared to 30% owning such a device by the end of 2013.^[3]

History

The Readies (1930)

The idea of the e-reader came to Bob Brown after watching his first "talkie" (movie with sound). In 1930, he wrote a book on this idea and titled it The Readies, playing off the idea of the "talkie".^[4] In his book, Brown says movies have outmaneuvered the book by creating the "talkies" and, as a result, reading should find a new medium: "A machine that will allow us to keep up with the vast volume of print available today and be optically pleasing".

Though Brown may have come up with the idea intellectually in the 1930s, early commercial e-readers did not follow his model. Nevertheless, Brown in many ways predicted what e-readers would become and what they would mean to the medium of reading. In an article Jennifer Schuessler writes, "The machine, Brown argued, would allow readers to adjust the type size, avoid paper cuts and save trees, all while hastening the day when words could be ‘recorded directly on the palpitating ether.’"^[5] He felt the e-reader should bring a completely new life to the medium of reading. Schuessler relates it to a DJ spinning bits of old songs to create a beat or an entirely new song as opposed to just a remix of a familiar song.^[5]

Candidates for the first e-book inventor

The inventor of the first e-book is not widely agreed upon. Some notable candidates include the following:

Roberto Busa (late 1940s)

The first e-book may be the Index Thomisticus, a heavily annotated electronic index to the works of Thomas Aquinas, prepared by Roberto Busa beginning in 1949 and completed in the 1970s.^[6] Although originally stored on a single computer, a distributable CD-ROM version appeared in 1989. However, this work is sometimes omitted; perhaps because the digitized text was a means to studying written texts and developing linguistic concordances, rather than as a published edition in its own right.^[7] In 2005, the Index was published online.^[8]

Ángela Ruiz Robles (1949)

In 1949, Ángela Ruiz Robles, a teacher from Galicia, Spain, patented in her country the first electronic book, la Enciclopedia Mecánica, or the Mechanical Encyclopedia. Her idea behind the device was to decrease the number of books that her pupils carried to the school.^[9]

Doug Engelbart and Andries van Dam (1960s)

Alternatively, some historians consider electronic books to have started in the early 1960s, with the NLS project headed by Doug Engelbart at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and the Hypertext Editing System and FRESS projects headed by Andries van Dam at Brown University.^[10][11][12] Augment ran on specialized hardware, while FRESS ran on IBM mainframes. FRESS documents were structure-oriented rather than line-oriented, and were formatted dynamically for different users, display hardware, window sizes, and so on, as well as having automated tables of contents, indexes, and so on. All these systems also provided extensive hyperlinking, graphics, and other capabilities. Van Dam is generally thought to have coined the term "electronic book",^[13][14] and it was established enough to use in an article title by 1985.^[15]

FRESS was used for reading extensive primary texts online, as well as for annotation and online discussions in several courses, including English Poetry and Biochemistry. Brown faculty made extensive use of FRESS; for example the philosopher Roderick Chisholm used it to produce several of his books. Thus in the Preface to Person and Object (1979) he writes "The book would not have been completed without the epoch-making File Retrieval and Editing System..."^[16]

Brown University’s work in electronic book systems continued for many years, including US Navy funded projects for electronic repair-manuals;^[17] a large-scale distributed hypermedia system known as InterMedia;^[18] a spinoff company Electronic Book Technologies that built DynaText, the first SGML-based book-reader system; and the Scholarly Technology Group's extensive work on the still-prevalent Open eBook standard.

Michael S. Hart (1971)

Despite the extensive earlier history, several publications report Michael S. Hart as the inventor of the e-book.^[19][20][21] In 1971, the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the University of Illinois gave Hart extensive computer-time. Seeking a worthy use of this resource, he created his first electronic document by typing the United States Declaration of Independence into a computer in plain text.^[22] Hart planned to create documents using plain text to make them as easy as possible to download and view on devices.

Early e-book implementations

After Hart first adapted the Declaration of Independence into an electronic document in 1971, Project Gutenberg was launched to create electronic copies of more texts - especially books.^[22]

Another early e-book implementation was the desktop prototype for a proposed notebook computer, the Dynabook, in the 1970s at PARC: a general-purpose portable personal computer capable of displaying books for reading.^[23]

In 1980 the Department of Defense began concept development for a portable electronic delivery device for technical maintenance information called project PEAM, the Portable Electronic Aid for Maintenance. Detailed specifications were completed in FY 82, and prototype development began with Texas Instruments that same year. Four prototypes were produced and delivered for testing in 1986. Tests were completed in 1987. The final summary report was produced by the US Army research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences in 1989 authored by Robert Wisher and J. Peter Kincaid.^[24]

A patent application for the PEAM device ^[25] was submitted by Texas Instruments titled "Apparatus for delivering procedural type instructions" was submitted Dec 4, 1985 listing John K. Harkins and Stephen H. Morriss as inventors.

In 1992, Sony launched the Data Discman, an electronic book reader that could read e-books that were stored on CDs. One of the electronic publications that could be played on the Data Discman was called The Library of the Future.^[26]

Early e-books were generally written for specialty areas and a limited audience, meant to be read only by small and devoted interest groups. The scope of the subject matter of these e-books included technical manuals for hardware, manufacturing techniques, and other subjects. In the 1990s, the general availability of the Internet made transferring electronic files much easier, including e-books.

E-book formats

As e-book formats emerged and proliferated, some garnered support from major software companies, such as Adobe with its PDF format and others supported by independent and open-source programmers. Different e-readers followed different formats, most of them specializing in only one format, thereby fragmenting the e-book market even more. Due to the exclusiveness and limited readerships of e-books, the fractured market of independent publishers and specialty authors lacked consensus regarding a standard for packaging and selling e-books.

However, in the late 1990s, a consortium formed to develop the Open eBook format as a way for authors and publishers to provide a single source-document which many book-reading software and hardware platforms could handle. Open eBook as defined required subsets of XHTML and CSS; a set of multimedia formats (others could be used, but there must also be a fallback in one of the required formats), and an XML schema for a "manifest", to list the components of a given e-book, identify a table of contents, cover art, and so on. This format led to the open format EPUB. Google Books has converted many public domain works to this open format.^[27]

In 2010, e-books continued to gain in their own underground markets. Many e-book publishers began distributing books that were in the public domain. At the same time, authors with books that were not accepted by publishers offered their works online so they could be seen by others. Unofficial (and occasionally unauthorized) catalogs of books became available on the web, and sites devoted to e-books began disseminating information about e-books to the public.^[28] Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. Consumer e-book publishing market are controlled by the "Big Five". The "Big Five" publishers include: Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster.^[29]

Libraries

US Libraries began providing free e-books to the public in 1998 through their web sites and associated services,^[30] although the e-books were primarily scholarly, technical or professional in nature, and could not be downloaded. In 2003, libraries began offering free downloadable popular fiction and non-fiction e-books to the public, launching an e-book lending model that worked much more successfully for public libraries.^[31] The number of library e-book distributors and lending models continued to increase over the next few years. From 2005 to 2008 libraries experienced 60% growth in e-book collections.^[32] In 2010, a Public Library Funding and Technology Access Study^[33] found that 66% of public libraries in the US were offering e-books,^[34] and a large movement in the library industry began seriously examining the issues related to lending e-books, acknowledging a tipping point of broad e-book usage.^[35] However, some publishers and authors have not endorsed the concept of electronic publishing, citing issues with demand, piracy and proprietary devices.^[36] In a survey of interlibrary loan librarians it was found that 92% of libraries held ebooks in their collections and that 27% of those libraries had negotiated interlibrary loan rights for some of their ebooks. This survey found significant barriers to conducting interlibrary loan for e-books.^[37] Demand-driven acquisition (DDA) has been around for a few years in public libraries, which allows vendors to streamline the acquisition process by offering to match a library's selection profile to the vendor's e-book titles.^[38] The library's catalog is then populated with records for all the e-books that match the profile.^[38] The decision to purchase the title is left to the patrons, although the library can set purchasing conditions such as a maximum price and purchasing caps so that the dedicated funds are spent according to the library's budget.^[38] The 2012 meeting of the Association of American University Presses included a panel on patron-drive acquisition (PDA) of books produced by university presses based on a preliminary report by Joseph Esposito, a digital publishing consultant who has studied the implications of PDA with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.^[39]

Challenges

Although the demand for e-book services in libraries has grown, difficulties keep libraries from providing the eBooks.^[40] Publishers will sell e-books to libraries, but they only have a limited license to the book in most cases. This means the library does not own the electronic text but that they can circulate it for either a certain period of time or a certain amount of check outs, or both. When a library purchases a e-book license, the cost is three times what it would be for a personal consumer.^[40]

Archival storage

The Internet Archive and Open Library offers over 6,000,000 fully accessible public domain e-books.

Dedicated hardware readers and mobile reader software

An e-reader, also called an e-book reader or e-book device, is a mobile electronic device that is designed primarily for the purpose of reading e-books and digital periodicals. An e-reader is similar in form, but more limited in purpose than a tablet. In comparison to tablets, many e-readers are better than tablets for reading because they are more portable, have better readability in sunlight and have longer battery life.^[41]

There have been several generations of dedicated hardware e-readers. The Rocket eBook^[42] and several others were introduced around 1998, but did not gain widespread acceptance. The establishment of the E Ink Corporation in 1997 led to the development of electronic paper, a technology which allows a display screen to reflect light like ordinary paper without the need for a backlight; electronic paper was incorporated first into the Sony Librie (released in 2004) and Sony Reader (2006), followed by the Amazon Kindle, a device which, upon its release in 2007, sold out within five hours.

As of 2009, new marketing models for e-books were being developed and a new generation of reading hardware was produced. E-books (as opposed to e-readers) have yet to achieve global distribution. In the United States, as of September 2009, the Amazon Kindle model and Sony's PRS-500 were the dominant e-reading devices.^[43] By March 2010, some reported that the Barnes & Noble Nook may be selling more units than the Kindle in the US.^[44]

On January 27, 2010 Apple Inc. launched a multi-function device called the iPad^[45] and announced agreements with five of the six largest publishers that would allow Apple to distribute e-books.^[46] The iPad includes a built-in app for e-books called iBooks and the iBookstore. The iPad, the first commercially profitable tablet computer, was followed in 2011 by the release of the first Android-based tablets as well as LCD versions of the Nook and Kindle; unlike previous dedicated e-readers, tablet computers are multi-function, utilize LCD displays (and usually touchscreens), and (like iOS and Android) be more agnostic to e-book vendor applications, allowing for installation of other e-book vendors. The growth in general-purpose tablet computer use allowed for further growth in popularity of e-books in the 2010s.

In July 2010, online bookseller Amazon.com reported sales of e-books for its proprietary Kindle outnumbered sales of hardcover books for the first time ever during the second quarter of 2010, saying it sold 140 e-books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there was no digital edition.^[47] By January 2011, e-book sales at Amazon had surpassed its paperback sales.^[48] In the overall US market, paperback book sales are still much larger than either hardcover or e-book; the American Publishing Association estimated e-books represented 8.5% of sales as of mid-2010, up from 3% a year before.^[49] At the end of the first quarter of 2012, e-book sales in the United States surpassed hardcover book sales for the first time.^[50]

In Canada, The Sentimentalists won the prestigious national Giller Prize. Owing to the small scale of the novel's independent publisher, the book was initially not widely available in printed form, but the e-book edition became the top-selling title for Kobo devices in 2010.^[51]

Until late 2013, use of an e-reader was not allowed on airplanes during takeoff and landing.^[52] In November 2013, the FAA allowed use of e-readers on airplanes at all times if it is in Airplane Mode, which means all radios turned off, and Europe followed this guidance the next month.^[53] In 2014, the New York Times predicted that by 2018 e-books will make up over 50% of total consumer publishing revenue in the United States and Great Britain.^[54]

E-reader applications

Some of the major book retailers and multiple third-party developers offer free (and in some third-party cases, premium paid) e-reader applications for the Mac and PC computers as well as for Android, Blackberry, iPad, iPhone, Windows Phone and Palm OS devices to allow the reading of e-books and other documents independently of dedicated e-book devices. Examples are apps for the Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Kobo eReader, and Sony Reader.

Timeline

Until 1979

~1949

• Ángela Ruiz Robles patented in Galicia, Spain, the idea of the electronic book, called the Mechanical Encyclopedia.
• Roberto Busa begins planning the Index Thomisticus^[7]

~1963

• Doug Engelbart starts the NLS (and later Augment) projects

~1965

• Andries van Dam starts the HES (and later FRESS) projects, with assistance from Ted Nelson, and other faculty at Brown University develop and use electronic textbooks for poetry and biology.

1971

• Michael S. Hart types the US Declaration of Independence into a computer and launches Project Gutenberg to create electronic copies of more books.^[22]

1978

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series launches (first novel published in 1979), featuring an electronic reference book containing all knowledge in the Galaxy (plus much more). Unlike real electronic books, this vast amount of data could be fit into something the size of a large paperback book, with updates received over the "Sub-Etha")

1980-1999

1988

• Susan Abrahams Ltd in Oxford was founded as an electronic publishing startup for authors

1990

• Eastgate Systems publishes the first hypertext fiction, "Afternoon, a story", by Michael Joyce, available on floppy disk.^[55]
• Electronic Book Technologies releases DynaText, the first SGML-based system for delivering large-scale books such as aircraft technical manuals. It was later tested on a US aircraft carrier as replacement for paper manuals, allowing the ship to rest 6" higher in the water.

1991

• Voyager Company develops Expanded Books, which are books on CD-ROM.

1992

The DD8 Data Discman

• F. Crugnola and I. Rigamonti design and create the first e-reader, called Incipit, as a thesis project at the Polytechnic University of Milan.^[56][57]
• Sony launches the Data Discman e-reader.^[58]
• Charles Stack's Book Stacks Unlimited begins selling new physical books online.

1993

• Hugo Award for Best Novel nominee texts published on CD-ROM by Brad Templeton.
• Bibliobytes, a website for obtaining digital books, both for free and for sale on the Internet, launches.^[59]

1994

• C & M Online is founded in Raleigh, North Carolina and publishes e-books through its imprint, Boson Books. Authors include Fred Chappell, Kelly Cherry, Leon Katz, Richard Popkin, and Robert Rodman.
• The popular format for publishing e-books changed from plain text to HTML.

1995

• Online poet Alexis Kirke discusses the need for wireless internet electronic paper readers in his article "The Emuse".^[60]

1996

• Project Gutenberg reaches 1,000 titles. The title target is 1,000,000.

1997

• E Ink Corporation is co-founded in 1997 by MIT undergraduates J.D. Albert, Barrett Comiskey, MIT professor Joseph Jacobson, Jeremy Rubin and Russ Wilcox.^[61] Their technology is later used to develop products like the Sony Reader, Barnes & Noble Nook, and Amazon Kindle.

1998

Bookeen's Cybook Gen1

• NuroMedia released the first handheld e-reader - Rocket eBook.^[62]
• SoftBook launched its SoftBook reader. This e-reader could store up to 00,000 pages of content, including text, graphics and pictures.^[63]
• The Cybook was sold and manufactured at first by Cytale (1998–2003) then by Bookeen.
• Websites began selling ebooks in English, such as eReader.com and eReads.com.

1999

• Publisher Simon & Schuster created a new imprint called ibooks and became the first trade publisher to simultaneously to publish some of their titles in e-book and print format.
• Oxford University Press offered a selection of its books over the Internet through netLibrary.
• Baen Books opens up the Baen Free Library and starts selling Baen titles as e-books.
• Kim Blagg, via her company Books OnScreen, began selling multimedia-enhanced ebooks on CDs through retailers including Amazon.com, bn.com and borders.com.^[64]

2000s

2000

• Microsoft releases the Microsoft Reader with ClearType for increased readability on PCs and handheld devices.^[65]
• Microsoft and Amazon worked together to sell e-books that could be purchased on the online bookstore and then downloaded to PCs and handhelds.
• Stephen King offers his novel Riding the Bullet only as a digital book; at the time it could only be read on a computer.^[66]
• Digital Book Index begins operation. DBI and the Online Books Page both organize electronic books from disparate sites into single, searchable indexes, creating large virtual libraries of ebooks.

2001

• Todoebook.com, the first website selling ebooks in Spanish.

2002

• Random House and HarperCollins start to sell digital versions of their titles in English.

2004

• Sony Librie, first ebook reader using an E Ink display was released.^[67]
• Google announces plans to digitize the holdings of several major libraries,^[68] as part of what would later be called the Google Books Library Project.

2005

• Amazon buys Mobipocket.
• Google is sued for copyright infringement by the Authors Guild for scanning books still in copyright.^[69]

2006

• Sony Reader PRS-500 with e-ink was released.^[70]
• LibreDigital launched BookBrowse as an online reader for publisher content.

2007

The larger Kindle DX with a Kindle 2 for size comparison

• Amazon launches Kindle in US.
• Bookeen launches Cybook Gen3 in Europe.

2008

• Adobe and Sony agree to share their technologies (Adobe Reader and DRM).
• Sony sells the Sony Reader PRS-505 in UK and France.

2009

• Bookeen releases the Cybook Opus in the US and in Europe.
• Sony releases the Reader Pocket Edition and Reader Touch Edition.
• Amazon releases the Kindle 2.
• Amazon releases the Kindle DX in the US.
• Barnes & Noble releases the Nook in the US.

2010s

2010

• Amazon.com releases the Kindle DX International Edition worldwide.
• Bookeen reveals the Cybook Orizon at CES.^[71]
• Apple releases the iPad bundled with an e-book app called iBooks.^[72]
• Kobo Inc. releases its Kobo eReader to be sold at Indigo/Chapters in Canada and Borders in the United States.
• Amazon reports that its ebook sales outnumbered sales of hardcover books for the first time ever during the second quarter of 2010.^[47]
• Amazon releases the third generation Kindle, available in Wi-Fi and 3G & Wi-Fi versions.
• BeBook releases the BeBook Neo, first e-reader in Europe with Wi-Fi.
• Kobo Inc. releases an updated Kobo eReader, which included Wi-Fi.
• Barnes & Noble releases the Nook Color.
• Sony releases its second generation Daily Edition PRS-950.
• Google launches Google eBooks offering over 3 million titles, becoming the world's largest e-book store.^[73]
• PocketBook expands its line with an Android e-reader.^[74]

2011

• The idea of the next-generation digital book called 'interactive e-book' was proposed.^[75]
• Amazon.com announces in May that its e-book sales in the US now exceed all of its printed book sales.^[76]
• Barnes & Noble releases the Nook Simple Touch eReader and Nook Tablet.^[77]
• Bookeen launches its own e-books store, BookeenStore.com, and starts to sell digital versions of titles in French.^[78]
• Nature Publishing publishes Principles of Biology, a customizable, modular textbook, with no corresponding paper edition.
• The e-reader market grows in Spain, and companies like Telefónica, Fnac, and Casa del Libro launches their e-readers with the Spanish brand "bq readers".
• Amazon launches the Kindle Fire and Kindle Touch.

2012

• PocketBook starts selling PocketBook Touch, an e-ink Pearl eReader, winning awards from German magazines Tablet PC and Computer Bild.^[79][80]
• Kbuuk released the cloud-based eBook self-publishing SaaS platform^[81] on the Pubsoft digital publishing engine.
• Apple releases iBooks Author, software for creating iPad e-books to be directly published in its iBooks bookstore or to be shared as PDF files.^[82]
• Apple opens a textbook section in its iBooks bookstore.^[83]
• The publishing companies Random House, Holtzbrinck, and arvato get an e-book library called Skoobe on the market.^[84]
• US Department of Justice prepares anti-trust lawsuit against Apple, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Penguin Group, Macmillan, and HarperCollins, alleging collusion to increase the price of books sold on Amazon.^[85][86]
• Amazon releases the Kindle Paperwhite, its first e-reader with a built-in LED light.
• Library.nu - previously called ebooksclub.org and gigapedia.com, a popular linking website for downloading ebooks - was accused of copyright infringement and shut down by court order on February 15.^[87]
• Ebooks sold in the US market collects over 3 billion in revenue.^[88]

2013

• On April 27, 2013, Barnes & Noble posts losses of $475 million on its Nook business for the prior fiscal year and in June 2013 announces its intention to discontinue manufacturing Nook tablets, although it plans to continue making and designing black-and-white e-readers like the Nook Simple Touch, which "are more geared to serious readers, who are its customers, than to tablets".^[89]
• The Association of American Publishers announces that ebooks now account for about 20% of book sales. Barnes & Noble estimates it has a 27% share of the U.S. e-books market.^[89]
• Apple executive Keith Moerer testifies in the ongoing e-book price fixing trial that the iBookstore held approximately 20% of the ebook market share in the United States within the months after launch - a figure that Publishers Weekly reports is roughly double many of the previous estimates made by third parties. Moerer further testified that iBookstore acquired about an additional 20% by adding Random House in 2011.^[90]
• Five major US e-book publishers, as part of their settlement of a price-fixing suit, were ordered to refund about $3 for every electronic copy of a New York Times best-seller that they sold from April 2010 to May 2012.^[88] This could equal $160 million in settlement charges.
• US District Court Judge Denise Cote finds Apple guilty of conspiring to raise the retail price of e-books and schedules a trial in 2014 to determine damages.^[91]
• Barnes & Noble releases the Nook Glowlight, which has a 6-inch touchscreen with E Ink Pearl’s Regal wave.
• Scribd launched the first public unlimited access subscription service for e-books.^[92]
• Oyster launches its unlimited access e-book subscription service.^[93]
• Mofibo launched the first Scandinavian unlimited access e-book subscription service.^[94]

2014

• US District Court Judge Cote grants class action certification to plaintiffs in a lawsuit over Apple’s alleged e-book price conspiracy; the plaintiffs are seeking $840 million in damages.^[95] Apple appeals the decision.
• Apple settles ebook antitrust case that alleged Apple conspired to e-book price-fixing out of court; however if Judge Cote’s ruling is overturned in appeal the settlement would be reversed.^[96]
• Amazon launches Kindle Unlimited as an unlimited-access e-book and audiobook subscription service.^[97]
• Amazon releases the Kindle Voyage that has a 6-inch, 300 ppi E-Ink Carta HD display, which was the highest resolution and contrast available in e-readers as of 2014.^[98] It also features an adaptive LED light and page turn buttons on the sides of the device.
• Kobo released the Aura HD with a 6.8-inch screen.

2015

• By a 2-1 vote, the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals concurs with Judge Cote that Apple conspired to e-book price fixing and violated federal antitrust law.^[99] Apple appealed the decision.
• Kobo released the Aura H₂0, the world's first waterproof e-reader.^[100]
• Amazon releases the Kindle Paperwhite (3rd generation) that has a 6-inch, 300 ppi E Ink Carta HD display and is the first e-reader to feature Bookerly, a font exclusively designed for e-readers.^[101]
• In September, it was announced that Oyster's unlimited access e-book subscription service was scheduled to be shut down in early 2016.^[102]
• B&N released the Glowlight Plus, its first waterproof e-reader.^[103]
• In December, Playster launched an unlimited-access subscription service including e-books and audiobooks.^[104]

Formats

Writers and publishers have many formats to choose from when publishing ebooks. Each format has advantages and disadvantages. The most popular e-readers^[105] and their natively supported formats are shown below:

Reader	Native e-book formats
Amazon Kindle and Fire tablets[106]	AZW, AZW3, KF8, non-DRM MOBI, PDF, PRC, TXT
Barnes & Noble Nook and Nook Tablet[107]	EPUB, PDF
Apple iPad[108]	EPUB, IBA (Multitouch books made via iBooks Author), PDF
Sony Reader[106]	EPUB, PDF, TXT, RTF, DOC, BBeB
Kobo eReader and Kobo Arc[109][110]	EPUB, PDF, TXT, RTF, HTML, CBR (comic), CBZ (comic)
PocketBook Reader and PocketBook Touch[111][112]	EPUB DRM, EPUB, PDF DRM, PDF, FB2, FB2.ZIP, TXT, DJVU, HTM, HTML, DOC, DOCX, RTF, CHM, TCR, PRC (MOBI)

Comparison to printed books

Advantages

In the space that a comparably sized print book takes up, an e-reader can contain thousands of e-books, limited only by its memory capacity.

Depending on the device, an e-book may be readable in low light or even total darkness. Many e-readers have a built-in light source, can enlarge or change fonts, use Text-to-speech software to read the text aloud for visually impaired, partially sighted, elderly or dyslexic people or just for convenience.^[113] Additionally, e-books allow for readers to look up words or find more information about the topic immediately. Material can be organized however the author prefers and is not limited to a linear path through the book as hyper-text can allow a number of paths through the material.^[114]

Printed books use three times more raw materials and 78 times more water to produce when compared to e-books.^[115]

While an e-reader costs more than most individual books, ebooks usually have a lower cost than paper books.^[116] Moreover, numerous e-books are available online free of charge.^[117] For example, all books printed before 1923 are in the public domain.^[118]

E-books may be printed for less than the price of traditional books using on-demand book printers.^[119]

Depending on possible digital rights management, e-books (unlike physical books) can be backed up and recovered in the case of loss or damage to the device on which they are stored, and it may be possible to recover a new copy without incurring an additional cost from the distributor, as well as to synchronize the text, highlights and bookmarks across several devices.^[120]

E-readers normally include dictionaries. This allows the user to look up the meaning of words while reading. Amazon has reported that 85% of readers look up a word while reading.^[121]

Downsides

There may be a lack of privacy for the user's e-book reading activities; for example, Amazon.com knows the user's identity, what the user is reading, whether the user has finished the book, what page the user is on, how long the user has spent on each page, and which passages the user may have highlighted.^[122]

The main obstacle to the e-book is that a large portion of people value the printed book as an object itself, including aspects such as the texture, smell, weight and appearance on the shelf.^[123] Print books are also considered valuable cultural items, and symbols of liberal education and the Humanities.^[124]

As Joe Queenan has written:

Electronic books are ideal for people who value the information contained in them, or who have vision problems, or who like to read on the subway, or who do not want other people to see how they are amusing themselves, or who have storage and clutter issues, but they are useless for people who are engaged in an intense, lifelong love affair with books. Books that we can touch; books that we can smell; books that we can depend on.^[125]

Kobo found that 60% of e-books that are purchased from their e-book store are never opened and found that the more expensive the book is, the more likely the reader would at least open the e-book.^[126]

Digital rights management

Most e-book publishers do not warn their customers about the possible implications of the digital rights management tied to their products. 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.^[127]

The e-books sold by most major publishers and electronic retailers, which are Amazon.com, Google, Barnes & Noble, Kobo Inc. and Apple Inc., are DRM-protected and tied to the publisher's e-reader software or hardware. The first major publisher to omit DRM was Tor Books, one of the largest publishers of science fiction and fantasy, in 2012. Smaller e-book publishers such as O'Reilly Media, Carina Press and Baen Books had already forgone DRM previously.^[128]

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 a set of image files, which may additionally be converted into text format by an OCR program.^[129] 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. It is even possible to release an e-book chapter by chapter as each chapter is written. This is useful in fields such as information technology where topics can change quickly in the months that it takes to write a typical book. It is also possible to convert an electronic book to a printed book by print on demand. However these are exceptions as tradition dictates that a book be launched in the print format and later if the author wishes an electronic version is produced.

The New York Times keeps a list of best-selling e-books, for both fiction^[130] and non-fiction.^[131]

E-book reading data

Kobo Inc. released e-book reading data collected from over 21 million readers worldwide in 2014. Some of the data said that only 44.4% of UK readers finished the bestselling e-book The Goldfinch and the 2014 number one bestselling e-book in the UK, "One Cold Night" was completed by 69% of readers; this is evidence that while popular e-books are being completely read, many are only sampled.^[132]

Market share of digital books

United States

In 2015, the Author Earnings Report estimates that Amazon holds a 74% market share of the e-books sold in the US.^[134]

Canada

Spain

In 2013, Carrenho estimates that e-books would have a 15% market share in Spain in 2015.^[136]

UK

According to Nielsen Book Research, e-book share went from 20% to 33% between 2012-2014, but down to 29% in the first quarter of 2015. Amazon-published and self-published titles accounted for 17 million of those books - worth £58m – in 2014, representing 5% of the overall book market and 15% of the digital market. The volume and value sales are similar to 2013 but up 70% since 2012.^[137]

Germany

The Wischenbart Report 2015 estimates the e-book market share to be 4.3%.^[138]

Brazil

The Brazilian e-book market is only emerging. Brazilians are technology savvy, and that attitude is shared by the government.^[138] In 2013, around 2.5% of all trade books sold were in digital format. This was a 400% growth over 2012, when only 0.5% of trade titles were digital. In 2014, the growth was slower, and Brazil finished the year with 3.5% of its trade titles being sold as e-books.^[138]

China

The Wischenbart Report 2015 estimates the e-book market share to be around 1%.^[138]

See also

Accessible publishing Book scanning Blook Cell phone novel Digital library

Flexible electronics List of digital library projects Networked book Online book TeX and LaTeX

Tablet computer Web fiction

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Electronic books.

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