Literature Ebook
Rubi Strycker
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An ebook (short for electronic book), also spelled as e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in electronic form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices.[1] Although sometimes defined as "an electronic version of a printed book",[2] some e-books exist without a printed equivalent. E-books can be read on dedicated e-reader devices, also on any computer device that features a controllable viewing screen, including desktop computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones.
In the 2000s, there was a trend of print and e-book sales moving to the Internet,[3] where readers buy traditional paper books and e-books on websites using e-commerce systems. With print books, readers are increasingly browsing through images of the covers of books on publisher or bookstore websites and selecting and ordering titles online. The paper books are then delivered to the reader by mail or any other delivery service. With e-books, users can browse through titles online, select and order titles, then the e-book can be sent to them online or the user can download the e-book.[4] By the early 2010s, e-books had begun to overtake hardcover by overall publication figures in the U.S.[5]
The main reasons people buy e-books are possibly because of lower prices, increased comfort (as they can buy from home or on the go with mobile devices) and a larger selection of titles.[6] With e-books, "electronic bookmarks make referencing easier, and e-book readers may allow the user to annotate pages."[7] "Although fiction and non-fiction books come in e-book formats, technical material is especially suited for e-book delivery because it can be digitally searched" for keywords. In addition, for programming books, code examples can be copied.[7] In the U.S., the amount of e-book reading is increasing. By 2014, 28% of adults had read an e-book, compared to 23% in 2013. By 2014, 50% of American adults had an e-reader or a tablet, compared to 30% owning such devices in 2013.[8]
E-books are also referred to as "ebooks", "eBooks", "Ebooks", "e-Books", "e-journals", "e-editions", or "digital books". A device that is designed specifically for reading e-books is called an "e-reader", "ebook device", or "eReader".
Some trace the concept of an e-reader, a device that would enable the user to view books on a screen, to a 1930 manifesto by Bob Brown, written after watching his first "talkie" (movie with sound). He titled it The Readies, playing off the idea of the "talkie".[9] In his book, Brown says movies have outmaneuvered the book by creating the "talkies" and, as a result, reading should find a new medium:
Brown's notion, however, was much more focused on reforming orthography and vocabulary, than on medium. He says: "It is time to pull out the stopper" and begin "a bloody revolution of the word," introducing huge numbers of portmanteau symbols to replace normal words, and punctuation to simulate action or movement, so it is not clear whether this fits into the history of "e-books" or not. Later e-readers never followed a model at all like Brown's. However, he correctly predicted the miniaturization and portability of e-readers. 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.'"[10] Brown believed that the e-reader (and his notions for changing the text itself) would bring a completely new life to reading. Schuessler correlates it with 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.[10]
The first e-book may be the Index Thomisticus, a heavily annotated electronic index to the works of Thomas Aquinas, prepared by Roberto Busa, S.J. beginning in 1946 and completed in the 1970s.[11] Although originally stored on a single computer, a distributable CD-ROM version appeared in 1989. However, this work is sometimes omitted. Maybe this is because the digitized text was a means for studying written texts and developing linguistic concordances, rather than as a published edition in its own right.[12] In 2005, the Index was published online.[13]
In 1949, ngela Ruiz Robles, a teacher from Ferrol, Spain, patented the Enciclopedia Mecnica, or the Mechanical Encyclopedia, a mechanical device which operated on compressed air where text and graphics were contained on spools that users would load onto rotating spindles. Her idea was to create a device which would decrease the number of books that her pupils carried to school. The final device was planned to include audio recordings, a magnifying glass, a calculator, and an electric light for night reading.[14] Her device was never put into production but a prototype is on display at the National Museum of Science and Technology in A Corua.[15]
Alternatively, some historians consider electronic books to have started in the early 1960s, with the NLS project headed by Douglas Engelbart at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and the Hypertext Editing System and FRESS projects headed by Andries van Dam at Brown University.[16][17][18] FRESS documents ran on IBM main frames and were structure-oriented rather than line-oriented. They 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",[19][20] and it was established enough to use in an article title by 1985.[21]
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's 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..."[22] Brown University's work in electronic book systems continued for many years, including US Navy funded projects for electronic repair-manuals;[23] a large-scale distributed hypermedia system known as InterMedia;[24] a spinoff company Electronic Book Technologies that built DynaText, the first SGML-based e-reader system; and the Scholarly Technology Group's extensive work on the Open eBook standard.
Despite the extensive earlier history, several publications report Michael S. Hart as the inventor of the e-book.[25][26][27] 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.[28] Hart planned to create documents using plain text to make them as easy as possible to download and view on devices. After Hart first adapted the U.S. Declaration of Independence into an electronic document in 1971, Project Gutenberg was launched to create electronic copies of more texts, especially books.[28]
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