An e-Book or e-Book, meaning electronic book is the digitised equivalent of the printed book. e-Books are commonly viewed on a personal computer or via a dedicated handheld device called an e-book reader.
e-Books come in a number of different formats including the Adobe’s PDF format, the Microsoft e-Book, and the Open e-Book for Palmtop.
e-Book publishing is still very much an emerging market and has yet to achieve worldwide distribution although Amazon’s Kindle reader and Sony’s PRS-500 model dominate the current e-Book market and received a lot of publicity in 2008.
Some of the advantages of the e-Book over conventional print include:
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• Text that can be searched automatically and cross-referenced via the use of hyperlinks.
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• A single e-Book reader can contain many books making it easier to carry around than several conventional books.
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• Variable text zooming making e-Books easier to read.
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• The ability to automatically be opened at the last read page.
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• Text-to-speech software can be used to convert e-Books to audio books automatically.
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• e-Books can incorporate embedded animated images or multimedia clips.
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• e-Book devices allow use in low light or even total darkness by means of backlight functionality.
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• e-Books make it very easy for authors to self-publish e-Books.
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• e-Books have non-permanent highlighting functionality making them a very useful research tool.
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• Built in dictionaries allowing the user to simply click on a word to find out the meaning.
The current e-Book market is estimated to be worth around ¥10 billion in Japan alone.
Current examples of the e-Book reader include:
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• Pixelar e-Reader - 2008/9
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• Plastic Logic - 2009
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• Kindle 2 - 2009
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• Cybook Gen3 - 2007
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• Hanlin eReader - 2007
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• Kindle - 2007
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• Sony Reader - 2006
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• iLiad - 2006
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• Librié - 2004
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