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An electronic book (variously: e-book, eBook, e-Book, ebook, digital book, or even e-edition) is a book-length 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-book readers, however, almost any sophisticated electronic device that features a controllable viewing screen, including computers, tablet computers, and smartphones can also be used to read e-books.
E-book reading is increasing in the US, since by 2014 28% of adults had read an e-book, compared to 23% in 2013. This is increasing because 50% of Americans by 2014 had a dedicated device, either an e-reader or a tablet, compared to 30% owning a device at the end of 2013.[3]
Some years earlier the idea of the e-reader came to Bob Brown after watching his first "talkie" (movie with sound). In 1930, he wrote an entire book on this invention 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]
The inventor of the first e-book is not widely agreed upon. Some notable candidates include the following:
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 the late 1940s. However, this is sometimes omitted, perhaps because the digitized text was (at least initially) a means to developing an index and concordance, rather than as a published edition in its own right.[6]
In 1949 a teacher from Galicia, Spain - Ángela Ruiz Robles - patented the first electronic book, powered by compressed air. Her intention was to decrease the number of books that her pupils carried to the school.[7]
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.[8][9][10] 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",[11][12] and it was established enough to use in an article title by 1985.[13]
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 ..."[14]
Brown University's leadership in electronic book systems continued for many years, including navy-funded projects for electronic repair-manuals;[15] a large-scale distributed hypermedia system known as InterMedia;[16] 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.
Despite the extensive earlier history, several publications report Michael S. Hart as the inventor of the e-book.[17][18][19] 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.[20]
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.[20]
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.[21]
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.[22]
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.
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. Google Books has converted many public domain works to this open format.
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.[23] Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. Consumer e-book publishing market are controlled by the "Big Six" better known today as the "Big Five" after the Penguin Random House merger in July 2013. The "Big Five" publishers include: Hatchette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster.[24]
US Libraries began providing free e-books to the public in 1998 through their web sites and associated services,[25] 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.[26] 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.[27] In 2010, a Public Library Funding and Technology Access Study[28] found that 66% of public libraries in the US were offering e-books,[29] 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.[30] However, some publishers and authors have not endorsed the concept of electronic publishing, citing issues with demand, piracy and proprietary devices.[31] 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 ebooks.[32] 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.[33] The library's catalog is then populated with records for all the e-books that match the profile.[33] 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.[33] 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.[34]
Although the want for e-book services in libraries has grown, and so the number of people with e-readers, some difficulties still keep libraries from being able to provide the popular technology. Just recently have most big publishers agreed to sell e-books to libraries for public use. It has taken many years but publishers of electronic books now realize that libraries providing an e-book to patrons can be a huge opportunity for advertising and usually results in patrons becoming customers.[35] Also, even though publishers will sell e-books to libraries now, they can only have the 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... then it’s gone. When the facility does make the decision to purchase the e-book license, the cost is three times what it would could for a personal consumer.[35]
There is no central organization or company archiving ebooks. Some early electronic texts are already impossible to locate.
There have been several generations of dedicated hardware e-book readers. The Rocket eBook[36] 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-book 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.[37] By March 2010, some reported that the Barnes & Noble Nook may be selling more units than the Kindle in the US.[38]
On January 27, 2010 Apple Inc. launched a multi-function device called the iPad[39] and announced agreements with five of the six largest publishers that would allow Apple to distribute e-books.[40] 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.[41] By January 2011, e-book sales at Amazon had surpassed its paperback sales.[42] 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.[43] At the end of the first quarter of 2012, e-book sales in the United States surpassed hardcover book sales for the first time.[44]
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.[45]
Until late 2013, use of e-book readers was not allowed on airplanes during takeoff and landing.[46] 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.[47] 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.[48]
Writers and publishers have many formats to choose from when publishing ebooks. Each format has advantages and disadvantages. The most popular ebook readers[79][80] and their natively supported formats are shown below.
Over 2 million free e-books were available between July 4 and August 4 in 2009.[88] Mobile availability of e-books may be provided for users with a mobile data connection, so that these e-books need not be stored on the device. In the space that a comparably sized print book takes up, an e-reader can potentially contain thousands of e-books, limited only by its memory capacity.
E-book websites can include the ability to translate books into many different languages, making the works available to speakers of languages not covered by printed translations. However, the quality of the machine translation can be low.
Depending on the device, an e-book may be readable in low light or even total darkness. Many newer readers have the ability to display motion, enlarge or change fonts,[89] use [90]
Printed books use 3 times more raw materials and 78 times more water to produce.[91] than e-books. However, the manufacture and distribution of e-book hardware (both the readers and the servers from which books are downloaded) consume materials and energy; the disposal of e-book hardware creates electronic waste; and the storage, distribution, and reading of e-books consume energy.
Depending upon the software support and used formats, non-textual multimedia can also be embedded into e-book pages as widgets, including images (and image galleries), videos, audio files and interactive (still or animated) models; this is similar to HTML elements which allow for presentation of multimedia content through embedding of the content inside web pages. This results in e-books offering richer reading experiences than is possible through traditional, physical books.
E-books, while often presented as "flipping" between "pages" (in a skeumorphic nod to traditional book design), are not necessarily limited to such presentation, and entries can be presented through downward scrolling; further, more novel widgets interactive widgets for revealing additional textual information can be added to an e-book.
While an e-book reader costs much more than most individual books, ebooks may be cheaper than paper books. Moreover, numerous e-books are available online free of charge. For example, all fiction from before the year 1900 is in the public domain. Also, libraries lend both classic and current e-book titles for limited times, free samples are available of many publications, and there are other lending models being piloted as well. E-books can be printed for less than the price of traditional new books using new on-demand book printers.
An e-book can be purchased/borrowed, downloaded, and used immediately, whereas when one buys or borrows a tangible book, one must go to a bookshop, a home library, or public library during limited hours, or wait for a delivery.
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. Compared to printed publishing, it is cheaper and easier for authors to self-publish e-books. Also, the dispersal of a free e-book copy can stimulate the sales of the printed version.[92]
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 devices 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 distribute, sell or use texts in the public domain freely.
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.[93] 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 eventually they may lose access to their purchase. Some forms of digital rights management depend on the existence of online services to authenticate the purchasers. When 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.
As with digital rights management in other media, e-books are more like rental or leasing than 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 provider of the DRM scheme, and the publisher of the reader software.
The e-books sold by most major publishers and electronic retailers, including notably [94]
In recent years, some websites including library.nu, BookFinder and Library Genesis have emerged which allow downloading ebooks by violating copyright.[95]
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.[96] 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.
As of 2010, there is no industry-wide e-book bestseller list, but various e-book vendors compile bestseller lists, such as those by Amazon Kindle Bestsellers[97] and Fictionwise.[98]
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-book reader is similar in form, but oftentimes more limited in purpose than, a tablet. In comparison to tablets, many E-readers are better than tablets for reading because e-readers are more portable, have better readability in sunlight (if they are e-ink readers), and may have longer battery life.
Additionally, 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.
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