Electronic books
by Chris Woodford. Last updated: November 24, 2011.
Back in the 19th century English author, Martin Tupper wrote: "A good book is the best of friends, the same today and for ever."
It's true: books are friendly, familiar, and loveable and that
probably explains why it's taking us so long to get used to
the idea of portable electronic books. But with the arrival of a new
generation of electronic book readers, such as the Sony Reader,
and Amazon Kindle, the days of the printed word just might be numbered.
Let's take a closer look at electronic books (e-books) and find out how
they work!
Photo: Left: Amazon Kindle electronic book reader. Photo by courtesy of
John Blyberg, published on Flickr
under a Creative Commons License.
Right: The rival Sony Reader PRS-350 is considerably smaller, partly because its touch-sensitive screen does
away with the need for a keyboard.
Two in one: books... and the information they contain
Think of a book and you think of a single object, but the books we
read are actually two things in one: there's the information (the words
and pictures and their meaning) and there's the physical object (the
paper, cardboard, and ink) that contains them. Sometimes the physical
part of a book is as important as the information it carries: it's
really true that we judge books by their covers—at least when we're
standing in shops deciding which ones to buy—and that's why publishers
devote so much attention to making their books look attractive. But, a
lot of the time, the information is much more important to us and we
don't really care how it's delivered. That's why many of us now turn to
the Web when we want to find things
out instead of visiting the local library.
In short, we've learned to split off the information we need from
the way it's delivered. E-books take this idea a step further. When we
talk about an e-book, we really mean a digital version of a printed
text that we can read on a handheld electronic device like a miniature
laptop computer— two quite
separate things, once again.
How do you store a book in electronic form?
An e-book is really just a computer file full of words (and
sometimes images). In theory, you could make an e-book just by typing
information into a word processor. The file you save has all the
elements of an electronic book: you can read the information on a
computer, search it for keywords, or share it easily with someone else.
The first attempt to create a worldwide library of e-books was called
Project Gutenberg
and it's still running today. Long before the World Wide Web came
along, a bunch of dedicated Gutenberg volunteers took printed books and
scanned or typed them into their computers to make electronic files
they could share. For legal reasons, these books were (and still are) mostly classic
old volumes that had fallen out of copyright. The electronic versions
of these printed books are very basic, text-only computer files stored
in a format called ASCII (American Standard Code for
Information Interchange)—a way of representing letters, numbers, and
symbols with the numbers 0-255 that virtually every computer can
understand.
Photo: The Amazon Kindle electronic book reader (left) alongside a rival, the Sony eReader (right).
Photo by courtesy of John Blyberg, published on Flickr
under a Creative Commons License.
Note the picture displayed on the Kindle screen: E Ink screens like this (explained more fully below) can show
pictures, though so far only in very unimpressive black and white.
The problem with ASCII is that the text contains very little
formatting information: you can't distinguish headings from text,
there's only one basic font, and there's no bold or italics. That's why
people developed much more sophisticated electronic files like PDF
(Portable Document Format). The basic idea of PDF was to store an
almost exact replica of a printed document in an electronic file that
people could easily read on screens or print out, if they preferred.
The HTML files people use to create web pages are another kind
of electronic information. Every HTML page on a website is a bit like a
separate page in a book, but the links on web pages mean you can easily
hop around until you find exactly the information you want. The links
on websites give you powerfully interconnected information that is
often much quicker to use than a library of printed books.
The greatest strength of ASCII, PDF, and HTML files (you can read
them on any computer) is also their greatest weakness: who wants to sit
staring at a computer screen, reading thousands of words? Most screens
are much less sharp than the type in a printed book and it quickly
tires your eyes reading in this way. Even if you can store lots of
books on your computer, you can't really take it to bed with you or
read it on the beach or in the bath-tub! Now, there's nothing to stop
you downloading simple text files onto something like an iPod or a
cellphone and reading them, very slowly and painfully, from the small
LCD display—but it's not most people's idea of
curling up with a good book. What we really need is something with the
power of a computer, the portability of a cellphone,
and the friendliness and readability of a printed book. And that's
exactly where electronic book readers come in.
How do you read an electronic book file?
An electronic book reader is a small, portable computer designed for
reading books stored in a digital format such as ASCII, PDF, HTML, or
another similar format. (Currently the two most popular ebook formats are
EPUB, a worldwide, open standard that evolved from an earlier standard called OEB (Open e-book) and widely used by Sony Readers and most other ebook readers, and AZW, a
proprietary format developed by Amazon and currently readable only
on its Kindle reader.) Books take up very little space when you store
them in electronic format: you could easily fit 10,000 electronic
copies of the Bible onto a single DVD. Most ebook readers can store hundreds
or even thousands of titles at a time and some have Wi-Fi Internet
connections so you can download more books whenever you wish.
The most important part of an e-book reader is the screen. The first
e-books used small versions of LCD laptop screens which have a
resolution (sharpness) of about 35 pixels per cm (90 pixels per inch).
You could easily see the dots making up the letters and it was quite
tiring to read for more than a few minutes at a time. The latest
e-books use an entirely different technology called electronic ink. Instead of
using LCD displays, they show words and letters using tiny, black and
white plastic granules that move about inside microscopic, spherical
capsules under precise electronic control. Displays like this have
about twice the resolution of ordinary computer screens, are clearly
visible in sunlight, and use much less power. In fact, they're almost
as sharp and easy to read as printed paper.
The lack of books in electronic format is one of the things that
puts people off using e-book readers—and that's what made Amazon.com's
Kindle reader both an exciting development and an instant success. Amazon already worked
with virtually all the world's publishers as a bookseller, so it was
able to make huge numbers of titles available for Kindle in electronic
format—over 88,000 books were available on the launch date.
That's certainly what people want and expect from an e-book
reader, but whether it will finally make electronic books as popular as
iPods remains to be seen.
Photo: You can read electronic books right now, even if you don't have a handheld ebook reader.
There's free electronic book software available for all the popular operating systems. You can also download versions of
the Amazon Kindle that work on a PC, Mac, iPad, or cellphone. Here's an electronic book reader
running on a normal computer screen, showing the first page of F.Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned.
Which electronic book reader should I buy?
With two hugely popular, rival ebook readers (the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader) jockeying for the lead, and a whole range of other products from manufacturers such as iRiver and Elonex not far behind, your next question is probably "Which one should I buy?"
How does one ebook reader differ from another?
All these products are broadly similar: they're all light, portable, and handheld and they all have large internal
flash memories that hold hundreds of books. Some have touchscreens; others (like the Kindles) have miniature keyboards. Some have wireless connections for downloading more books; others (such as the Sony Readers) have to be connected to a computer with a USB cable. If you connect with a cable, running an ebook reader is rather like running an iPod or MP3 player: typically you maintain a library on your PC with a piece of software similar to iTunes, to which you add and remove books and other documents. When you plug in your reader, it synchronizes its internal
memory with the library on your PC, adding any new books and deleting any unwanted ones. If you have a wireless reader, you maintain your library on the reader itself, adding and removing books directly. So... wireless or cable? It's not a big issue, I don't think: you'll probably be downloading books relatively infrequently.
Photo: Horses for courses: Portable versions of the Sony Reader have a much smaller page size than a typical hardbook book. That's great if you want to carry your reader in your jacket pocket or your handbag so you can read while you're travelling. It's much less attractive if you do most of your reading at home: the smaller the screen, the more often you'll need to turn the pages. This is one example of why it pays to think about how you're going to use an ebook reader before you buy it.
The best and most expensive readers use extremely high-resolution E Ink screens that work better in daylight than at night
(you'll need good indoor lighting or a clip-on light if you're planning to do most of your e-reading in the evenings); LCD-screen readers (such as the Elonex) have backlit screens that favor indoor use and (like computer screens) can be tricky to read in bright sunlight. E Ink apparently uses energy only when you turn the pages, so the Sony Reader can happily survive for about two weeks of very heavy use on a single charge of the batteries. That means it's also very environmentally friendly to read books or documents from a handheld ebook reader compared to reading them on a computer screen.
Some ebook readers can cope with ebooks in all kinds of different formats. The Sony Reader, for example, lets you read Microsoft Word and PDF files, as well as standard formats such as EPUB. The PDF viewer is really neat, allowing you to rotate the screen or scroll documents column-by-column for easy reading. The Amazon Kindle doesn't currently support the EPUB format, but it does allow you to view other file formats such as PDF.
Photo: You can use the Sony Reader in "landscape" orientation if you find that easier, though you have to switch it over manually from the keyboard. Here I'm reading a PDF file of Sustainable Energy—Without the hot air by physicist David MacKay. If environmental issues matter to you, reading documents on an ebook reader like this might appeal, because it uses a fraction as much energy as a laptop. The text is much more legible than it appears in this photograph.
Where can you get ebooks from?
Most books currently produced by publishers are copyrighted, which means you can expect to pay a fair price if you want to use them. Relatively few publishers have embraced ebooks so far, though there are some notable exceptions (including Penguin). Generally, it's relatively easy to find mass-market bestsellers in ebook format but much harder to find more specialized books and quality, literary fiction. Public domain classics are the easiest books to find in ebook format, largely thanks to the sterling and visionary work of Project Gutenberg. If you enjoy reading classic novels, buying an ebook reader is probably a no-brainer; if you're more a fan of 20th century literary fiction, you'll have a much harder time finding what you want in digital form.
If you buy copyright ebooks from either Amazon or another outlet, you'll find they're protected by what's called DRM (digital rights management)—effectively a kind of encryption that prevents people from distributing pirate copies of books illegally. Amazon uses its own DRM system, while Sony (and others) use a system developed by Adobe called Adobe Digital Editions, which requires you to register
your reader the first time you use it. DRM protection restricts what you can do with books you've bought, but it's not necessarily the drawback it seems. First, it's very much a necessity from a publisher's point of view: it's only because ebook readers like the Kindle have DRM protection built in that publishers are starting to take what they see as a major risk in making their books available in digital formats. Another advantage of DRM is that it allows libraries to lend people ebooks for limited periods of time. I'm delighted to find I can log in to my local library and download, for free, for periods of up to 14 days, a fair selection of a few hundred popular ebooks. Once the borrowing time has expired, the books delete themselves automatically from my reader!
Who invented electronic books?
- ~3000BCE: Ancient Egyptians make the first paper from the stem of the papyrus plant.
- 105CE: Chinaman Ts'ai Lun develops modern paper from hemp fiber.
- ~1450: German Johannes Gutenberg invents the modern process of printing with movable metal type, which leads to a vast increase in the popularity of books.
- 1945: In a famous article in Atlantic Monthly called As We May Think, US government scientist Vannevar Bush proposes a kind of desk-sized memory store called Memex, which has some of the features later incorporated into electronic books and the World Wide Web (WWW).
- 1968: Computer scientist Alan Kay imagines a portable computerized book, which he nicknames the Dynabook.
- 1971: Michael Hart launches Project Gutenberg at the University of Illinois: an electronic repository for classic, out-of-copyright books.
- 1990: Sony launches its Data Discman, a portable electronic reader costing $550 that stores and reads books from compact discs (CD-ROMs). It is a commercial flop.
- 1990s: Encyclopedia publishers such as Britannica and Dorling Kindersley (DK) experiment with making their books available on interactive CD-ROMs. DK wins many awards for its CD-ROMs, but closes its multimedia business in the late 1990s as competition mounts from the Internet.
- Late 1990s: Several new handheld, electronic book readers are launched, including the SoftBook, RocketBook, and Everybook—but fail to make much impact on the marketplace.
- 2000: Best-selling horror author Stephen King launches a short novel called Riding the Bullet in electronic format and sells over half a million copies.
- 2001: Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales give the world Wikipedia—an encyclopedia anyone can contribute to.
- 2007: Amazon.com launches its wireless Kindle reader with thousands of electronic books available in electronic format, along with newspapers, RSS feeds, and other forms of "digital content."
- 2010: Amazon Kindle becomes Amazon's number one bestselling product, confirming that electronic books (and readers) really have arrived!
- 2011: Project Gutenberg celebrates 40 years of producing and distributing electronic books.
Further Reading
On this website
Sites where you can buy and download ebooks
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it'll get you started at least. Note that, for copyright reasons, some of the American bookstores will not sell ebooks to international customers and vice-versa:
- Project Gutenberg: The original online ebook repository. These guys deserve a medal for laying the foundations of the ebook revolution some four decades ago.
- Amazon: A good selection of public domain and modern ebooks, but currently only for the Kindle. Remember that you can also read Kindle books on your PC, Mac, or cellphone (but not on your Sony Reader).
- Barnes and Noble: Produce ebooks for their own reader (known as NOOK™).
- Blackwell's: A leading academic publisher, Blackwells currently offers 85,000 ebooks through its website, including around 5000 works of fiction.
- eBooks.com: An online bookstore specializing in ebooks.
- epubBooks.com: Promotes free, public domain books and paid-for modern books.
- Foyles: The iconic bookstore in London, England has recently committed itself to electronic books as well.
- Google eBookstore: Many public domain books are already available and Google has ambitious plans to help publishers distribute contemporary books in electronic format too.
- Penguin: Clearly committed to making much of its catalog available in ebook format. An excellent place to start if you like quality fiction, especially if you have a Sony Reader (or some other EPUB-compatible device).
- Random House USA and Random House UK: Another publisher with a big commitment to making books available as ebooks. You'll find a large selection here.
- Waterstones: A good starting point for UK customers who like mass-market bestsellers. Promotes the Sony Reader and sells books in EPUB and PDF formats.
