Although I love the feel and smell of real books in my hands I am not against e-books. They are a convenience for many and you have the advantage of being able to store lots of them on the media of your choice.
I have sold them in the past and I plan to sell them again. I have also given away plenty of free ones in my time and you will find free ones on my website too. They will be shown via Blog Posts below.
You can get lots more free e-books via Free-eBooks.net by becoming a member by clicking the link below.
Another fantastic source for free e-books is Project Gutenberg (link below).
Contents
About E-Books
An ebook (short for electronic book), also known as an e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. Although sometimes defined as “an electronic version of a printed book”, some e-books exist without a printed equivalent. E-books can be read on dedicated e-reader devices, but also on any computer device that features a controllable viewing screen, including desktop computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones.
In the 2000s, there was a trend of print and e-book sales moving to the Internet, where readers buy traditional paper books and e-books on websites using e-commerce systems. With print books, readers are increasingly browsing through images of the covers of books on publisher or bookstore websites and selecting and ordering titles online; the paper books are then delivered to the reader by mail or another delivery service. With e-books, users can browse through titles online, and then when they select and order titles, the e-book can be sent to them online or the user can download the e-book. By the early 2010s, e-books had begun to overtake hardcover by overall publication figures in the U.S.
The main reasons for people buying e-books are possibly lower prices, increased comfort (as they can buy from home or on the go with mobile devices) and a larger selection of titles. PC Magazine Encyclopedia says “electronic bookmarks make referencing easier, and e-book readers may allow the user to annotate pages.” Although fiction and non-fiction books come in e-book formats, technical material is especially suited for e-book delivery because it can be digitally searched for keywords. In addition, for programming books, code examples can be copied. The amount of e-book reading is increasing in the U.S.; by 2014, 28% of adults had read an e-book, compared to 23% in 2013; and by 2014, 50% of American adults had an e-reader or a tablet, compared to 30% owning such devices in 2013.
E-Books Terminology
E-books are also referred to as “ebooks”, “eBooks”, “Ebooks”, “e-Books”, “e-journals”, “e-editions”, or “digital books”. A device that is designed specifically for reading e-books is called an “e-reader”, “ebook device”, or “eReader”.
The History Of E-Books
The Readies (1930)
Some trace the concept of an e-reader, a device that would enable the user to view books on a screen, to a 1930 manifesto by Bob Brown, written after watching his first “talkie” (a movie with sound). He titled it The Readies, playing off the idea of the “talkie”. In his book, Brown says movies have outmanoeuvred the book by creating the “talkies” and, as a result, reading should find a new medium:
“A simple reading machine which I can carry or move around, attach to any old electric light plug and read hundred-thousand-word novels in 10 minutes if I want to, and I want to.”
Brown’s notion, however, was much more focused on reforming orthography and vocabulary, than on medium (“It is time to pull out the stopper” and begin “a bloody revolution of the word.”): introducing huge numbers of portmanteau symbols to replace normal words, and punctuation to simulate action or movement; so it is not clear whether this fits into the history of “e-books” or not. Later e-readers never followed a model at all like Brown’s; however, he correctly predicted the miniaturization and portability of e-readers. 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.” Brown believed that the e-reader (and his notions for changing the text itself) would bring a completely new life to reading. Schuessler correlates it with 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.
Inventors
The inventor of the first e-book is not widely agreed upon. Some notable candidates include the following:
Roberto Busa (1946–1970)
The first e-book may be the Index Thomisticus, a heavily annotated electronic index to the works of Thomas Aquinas, prepared by Roberto Busa, S.J. beginning in 1946 and completed in the 1970s. Although originally stored on a single computer, a distributable CD-ROM version appeared in 1989. However, this work is sometimes omitted; perhaps because the digitized text was a means for studying written texts and developing linguistic concordances, rather than as a published edition in its own right. In 2005, the Index was published online.
Ángela Ruiz Robles (1949)
In 1949, Ángela Ruiz Robles, a teacher from Ferrol, Spain, patented the Enciclopedia Mecánica, or the Mechanical Encyclopedia, a mechanical device that operated on compressed air where text and graphics were contained on spools that users would load onto rotating spindles. Her idea was to create a device that would decrease the number of books that her pupils carried to school. The final device was planned to include audio recordings, a magnifying glass, a calculator and an electric light for night reading. Her device was never put into production but a prototype is kept in the National Museum of Science and Technology in A Coruña.
Douglas Engelbart And Andries Van Dam (1960s)
Alternatively, some historians consider electronic books to have started in the early 1960s, with the NLS project headed by Douglas Engelbart at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and the Hypertext Editing System and FRESS projects headed by Andries van Dam at Brown University. FRESS documents ran on IBM mainframes and were structure-oriented rather than line-oriented; they 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”, and it was established enough to use in an article title by 1985.
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’s 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…” Brown University’s work in electronic book systems continued for many years, including US Navy funded projects for electronic repair-manuals; a large-scale distributed hypermedia system known as InterMedia; a spinoff company Electronic Book Technologies that built DynaText, the first SGML-based e-reader system; and the Scholarly Technology Group’s extensive work on the Open eBook standard.
Michael S. Hart (1971)
Despite the extensive earlier history, several publications report Michael S. Hart as the inventor of the e-book. 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 in plain text. Hart planned to create documents using plain text to make them as easy as possible to download and view on devices.
Read more about The History Of E-Books here.
E-Books Formats
Read about E-Books Formats here.
The Production Of E-Books
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. Occasionally, as in some projects, an e-book may be produced by re-entering the text from a keyboard. Sometimes only the electronic version of a book is produced by the publisher. It is 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. The New York Times keeps a list of best-selling e-books, for both fiction and non-fiction.
Read more about E-Books here.
Blog Posts
Links
BruceEmmerling on Pixabay – The image shown at the top of this page is the copyright of BruceEmmerling. You can find more great work from the photographer Bruce and lots more free stock photo’s at Pixabay.
Free-eBooks.net – Official website. Free-eBooks.net is the internet’s number one source for free e-book downloads, e-book resources & e-book authors. Read and download e-books for FREE – anytime.
Use the link above to sign up and enjoy five free e-books each and every month with a Standard Account or upgrade to V.I.P. status for unlimited e-book and audiobook downloads.
Project Gutenberg – Project Gutenberg is an online library of free e-books and was the first provider of free electronic books. Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, invented e-books in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of them and related content today.