Electronic books

Last updated: April 9, 2010.

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 Librié, 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: Amazon Kindle electronic book reader. Photo by courtesy of John Blyberg, published on Flickr under a Creative Commons License.

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.

Photo: Imagine being able to carry hundreds of books around in your pocket!

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 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.

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 store 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. (Microsoft's e-book file format is called OEB, which stands for Open e-book.) 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 readers can store hundreds or even thousands of titles at a time and they have 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 e-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 makes Amazon.com's new Kindle reader such an exciting development. Amazon already works with virtually all the world's publishers as a bookseller, so it's been 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 even without a reader. There's free electronic book software available for most operating systems. 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.

A brief history of electronic books

Photo: One of the simplest e-books you can buy: a basic electronic dictionary built into a handheld device about the same size as a pocket calculator. This one has only a small display and a simple rubber membrane keyboard.

• ~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."