E-books

From Isopedia

1 HISTORY and BACKGROUND INFORMATION
2 TECHNICAL INFORMATION
3 References
4 Team Members

HISTORY and BACKGROUND INFORMATION

An e-book is known as an electronic book. It is is an electronic (or digital) equivalent of a conventional printed book. The term has occasionally been used ambiguously to refer to either an individual work in a digital format, or a hardware device used to read books in digital format, called an e-book reader. E-books are an up and coming, rapidly changing technology, that can go out to include other formats, such as a online magazines or digital books designed to be listened to as audio books.

An e-book is commonly bundled by a publisher for distribution, as an e-book, an ezine, which is a periodic publication posted on a website or sent out by e-mail, or an Internet newspaper. Metadata relating to the text is usually included with the e-book. Metadata normally include details about the author, title, publisher, and copyright date.

E-books generated from e-text. E-text is textual information that is available in a coded, but human-readable format and read by electronic means, but more specifically it refers to files in the ASCII character encoding. ASCII is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. This means that it is a character encoding system based on the English language. E-text is widely know as an electronic thing that represents words and is a published work or text. Today, people use the titles “e-books” and “e-texts” as interchangeable words. However, while e-text has data in the ASCII format, e-books often use software that protects the book to be copied and used. This is enforcing copyright laws and patent laws.

The first producer of published, free e-books was Project Gutenberg. The founder of Project Gutenberg is Michael Hart; he invented e-books in 1971 and is now the founder of the largest collection of free electronic books. He created e-books simply based on the fact that he was in the right place at the right time. Hart was given an operator's account with $100,000,000 of computer time in it by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois in 1971. He did not think he could do anything within the limits of normal computing to compensate value equal to 100 million, so he came up with the idea that the greatest value made by computers would be to offer the storage and retrieval of library catalogs.

E-books can be ordered online through various websites and they are delivered to you via e-mail. Today there are, an increasing number of web sites, news groups, discussion boards, and email newsletters dedicated only to the promotion of e-books. You can find web sites that provide information on very specific genres. Soon readers will be able to learn about good new books more easily than they do today. E-books can be downloaded as a whole book or just a part of the novel. Also, since accessibility is so easy, reviewers are able to read and review many more books more efficiently.

TECHNICAL INFORMATION

Almost all information is available on the internet in electronic format. E-books are one of the most commonly used sources online. People can view and read books on a screen with a table of contents, pictures, and numbered pages, exactly like a printed book. People spend so much time sitting in front of the computer that they might as well do something worth while and read a book. E-books allow users to save time.

Often, E-books are produced from pre-existing hard-copy books. Books are generally available by the process of document scanning. At first when you scan the book it will be in an image format. You then need to convert this into text format using an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program. Hundreds of E-Books can be stored on one file on a computer instead of in a bookshelf, which is convenient for those that travel. Because they are stored online, they are not perishable. E-books can be downloaded to a computer or even a PDA as well.

Unlike other documents found on the internet, e-books can be protected from users copying information. For example, an e-book created on or after January 1, 1978 is automatically copyright protected for 70 years after the author's death.