eBooks

An e-book (also: eBook, ebook), sometimes called an electronic book, is an electronic (or digital) equivalent of a conventional printed book. more...

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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, more specifically called an e-book device or e-book reader. E-books are an emerging and rapidly changing technology, that can branch to include other formats, such as a online magazines, such as the Grantville Gazette, published by Baen's Books, or digital books designed to be listened to as audio books.

The term e-text is a broader term than e-book, and is also used for the particular case of data in ASCII text format, rather than books in proprietary file formats. It also includes the academic e-text, which commonly contains components such as facsimile images, apparatus criticus, and scholarly commentary on the work from one or more editors specially qualified to edit the author or work in question.

An e-book is commonly bundled by a publisher for distribution (as an e-book, an ezine, or an Internet newspaper), whereas e-text is distributed in plain text on the Web, or in the case of academic works, in the form of discrete media such as compact discs. Metadata relating to the text are sometimes included with etext (though it appears more frequently with e-book). Metadata commonly include details about author, title, publisher, and copyright date; less common are details regarding language, genre, relevant copyright conventions, etc.

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 Scanners, having the technology to quickly scan books without damaging the original print edition. Scanning a book produces an image file, which must then be converting into text format by an OCR program. 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 e-book form is produced by the publisher; it is usually possible technically to convert this to a printed book by short-run printing.

Formats

This section is for formats, not individual ebook readers that use a common format.

A writer or publisher has many options when it comes to choosing a format for production. While the average end-user might arguably simply want to read books, every format has its exponents and champions, and debates over "which format is best" can become intense. The myriad of e-book formats is sometimes referred to as the "Tower of eBabel". For the average end user to read a book, every format has its advantages and disadvantages. Formats available include, but are by no means limited to:

Read more at Wikipedia.org