eBooks and eTextbooks

eBooks and eTextbooks Related Information:

Most students today take so many classes and have to carry around so many textbooks that their backpacks weigh enough to wear them down even before they reach their classrooms. People that travel a lot for work and need to carry around many types of books, often find it difficult to stay on their feet under the weight of all the books. Many students have to do without a lot of textbooks simply because they cannot afford them. Well, now there seems to be a solution for all the above mentioned problems – eBooks and eTextbooks.

What Are eBooks and eTextbooks?

Books and textbooks available in the electronic format are known as eBooks and eTextbooks. These electronic books are available on CD ROMS, floppies, and can also be downloaded from the Internet and different websites.

In the year 2000, studies conducted on the market for eBooks and eTextbooks revealed that it was a market of $9 million to $10 million, in the United States. But just 5 short years later, this market has expanded to become worth billions of dollars, and that is taking only the United States into account. The rising popularity of eBooks and eTextbooks has been due to their various benefits.

Benefits of eBooks and eTextbooks

1) Benefits to the readers or the consumer:

eBooks and eTextbooks are ordered online and are delivered directly to your computer. You do not have to pay for delivery charges, handling charges, or any type of shipping charges. This translates into a considerable amount of savings.

eBooks can be downloaded onto your laptop or any kind of PDA. You can download any number of eBooks and read them at your convenience, either on a bus, or in an airplane, in the comforts of your home, or while standing in line at a grocery store! You do not have to worry about the weight of the eBooks either.

Since publishers save on printing costs, storage costs, and other overhead charges with eBooks and eTextbooks, these are available at a much lower cost than the traditional paper books and textbooks. This is especially beneficial to students, who otherwise cannot afford expensive textbooks, and often have to go to a library to read them, or have to borrow from friends, both of which may not always be possible.

eBooks and eTextbooks can be very interactive and can also include audio as well as video. They are easily searchable and can also be bookmarked easily. You can change the look of your eBook or eTextbook with the use of different fonts and colors, and also have the option of adding notes and comments to your eBook. All this cannot be possible with the paper books.

2) Benefits to the authors and publishers:

Writers can finally get their manuscripts or books published as eBooks without having to spend huge sums of money.

Publishers can publish eBooks at a fraction of the cost that it takes to print paper books and can thus pass some benefits to the reader as well.

Publishers can easily put up an eBook for review without having to print a single copy of it.

Formats of eBooks and eTextbooks

eBooks and eTextbooks are available in different formats and you can choose one according to the type of hardware and software that you have. The different formats are:

HTML: eBooks formatted in html are very easy to use and read and do not require any special software to be read, other than your PC browser.

Adobe PDF: The adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) is used as a standard format for eBooks and eTextbooks worldwide. You require an adobe reader to read PDF eBooks and it can be used with Windows, Macintosh, and palm PDAs.

Microsoft Reader: Such eBooks are compatible with Windows desktop and laptop computers and also with hand held PDAs. A new technology from Microsoft, known as ClearType, makes the words in these eBooks look much like words on a printed book.

Other eBook and eTextbook formats include:

Gemstar eBooks
Instant eBooks
Mobipocket
Palmreader
Microsoft Word