UNIT 1.5: E-BOOKS

E-books

An e-book is basically an electronic version of a book. It is simply nothing more than a electronic file containing the text of an existing book. E-books come in a variety of formats each with its own purpose, features and particular benefits. Some books are made to be like paperbacks, but available on a computer or possible a PDA. The purpose of this is to be able to carry a library of books on a  E-reader. However other e-books intentions are to show a film clip to accompany to a textual description, or play music file to accompany a piece of music. 

Text e-books

Text document based e-books are the most simplest forms of e-book. All that is needed is to write the text in a text editor or scan it into text from paper using a text converter  the file format is simply a text format, so basically it is simply in a linear form in the one document. Although this may be extremely simple it has the advantage of being very easily searchable and portable to any platform.

Word e-books

word document books are created using simple word-processing software and most of the time it is stored in a single word processing document file which manages the content and layout  in a format within the file. Also it is possible to put hyperlinks within the document, which makes it possible to have multimedia content in the e-book. Although multimedia content is usually large, especially when images are put in. Because of this it is not generally not used as a finished format, nevertheless this format can be used in environments where everyone shares shares the same Microsoft office where a number of authors might be required to collaborative simply on a project.  

Adobe PDF e-books 

Adobes portable document format (PDF) are stored in a single PDF file. This file has been extremely successful because virtually all the computers and software manuals are now published and distributed in this format. The majority of the websites that allows downloads of articles, newsletters,and reports will use PDF for such documents. It is also a growing medium for fully fledged e-books.
PDF has a number of features that make it essential for the presentation of textual material.  A PDF file is designed to store the text and layout in a device independent manner so that the original full colour.

Website e-books

One of the most important and flexible format of e-book is that created as a website in HTML or XHTML format. Websites allows videos, images, sounds, movies and animations and can shifted around quite simply to wherever and whenever you want to be, this format allows the richest and most flexible multimedia experience. As the website is a collection of files it is more complicated to put into a single fire. The disadvantage of this is that it adds another stage to creating the e-book, and resulting file might be quite large. Also as it is an Exe. file some firewalls do not trust the content when an attempt made to deliver the file   as .exe files are commonly used to hide viruses and Trojan horse programmes .

Value of e-books 

E-books Offer the readers unlimited books on a e-reader wherever they are. Unlike paperback books e-books can be can be searched by keyword, and organised by chapter page, topic or any method the author decides would be useful. Also the size and font can be changed for the viewers preference. and even the text can be read aloud. E-books can be faster to produce and amend the than conventional books, and thus reference books can be kept to update more easily. As the costs of storage and distributions are so low,e-books can be substantially than paperbacks and often, especially where there are no copyright issues, they are free.