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e-book
Abbreviated form of "electronic-book." An ebook is a book that is stored in a format that is easily transferred over the Internet, or copied from one computer to another.
An author/publisher may choose to release his or her books as an ebook (similar to how Cory Doctorow released his books under the Creative Commons), or a publisher may include an electronic form of a book with a 'dead tree' version. Many technical book publishers tend to do this.
Convinience[edit]
The first four Harry Potter books, around 3,000 pages collectively, could be compressed using RAR (if they were in simple text format) to fit on a single 1.44 megabyte disk. Compression and transmission of even gigantic texts is easy and convinient.
Use in Research[edit]
If in the correct format (Text, HTML, RTF, some PDF documents) it is possible to do context searches under a given subject. For example, O'Reilly sells an e-book form of their HTML books. If you search all the books for a particular item, say "XHTML," you have a much quicker and easier way to find all references to XHTML in your printed books.
Research can also be done on public domain texts and use in achedemic reports and for quotes on obscure topics by famous authors. See: http://www.gutenberg.org/
On File Sharing Networks[edit]
Most file sharing systems give users full access to hundreds or thousands of e-books. However, one of the advantages companies who produce books and ebooks have over producers of movies, music, and games is that most users do not like to read an entire book on their computer screen.
While it is possible to print an entire book, the cost of consumer ink in printers is prohibitively high, making this an unpopular form of piracy.
| This article is based on a public domain infoAnarchy article: EBook | iA |
