The case for e‐books: an introduction

Abstract

E-book has become a convenient all-purpose term to describe a variety of reading experiences and methods for packaging and distributing digital content. An electronic book or an e-book is simply the content of a written manuscript converted into a format that can be read electronically, in the same way that a word-processing document is read. The term can also refer to the hardware device that is used to read an electronic book. (http://skyways.lib.ks.us/central/ebooks/ technology.html) E-books can take many forms. Primarily, they are electronic versions of documents already in print form, but recently texts which exist solely as e-books have been put on the market. E-books have been around for at least three decades. One of the earliest efforts, Project Gutenberg, at the University of Illinois (http://www.gutenberg.net/history.html), offered the contents of book titles in the public domain, keyed into electronic format and made available for free on the Internet. For many years, commercial publishers were not interested in electronic publishing and very little was available in this format with the exception of encyclopedias on CD-ROM which became popular but required a computer and a CD-ROM player to use.Publishers became more interested in publishing books in electronic format as computing power, storage technology, and telecommunication speed improved and they watched the successful introduction of electronic journals. However, it was not until the 1990s that commercial publishers began working with vendors of hardware to offer a variety of electronic reading choices (Ardito, 2000). Three basic hardware options for reading e-books have developed:(1) a hand-held device dedicated to reading e-books; (2) a personal digital assistant (PDA) that also can be used for other purposes; (3) a desktop or laptop computer (Roush, 2001).E-books have several advantages over traditional paper books, however, and forward-looking librarians should be considering their place in the collection:. E-books can be stored and transmitted at very little cost compared to the cost of all the processes that go into producing paper copies.

Development of Electronic Module Text Writing Procedure Discovery Based Learning in High School

“…This benefits the link so users can refer to certain pieces of information or access any part of the e-module easily. Last but not least, e-modules are highly integrated with multimedia elements, such as audio, background music, animation and video that make reading not only more interesting but easier to understand [19][20][21] [22].…”

Ebooks and Interlibrary Loan: Licensed to Fill?

“…It is not surprising that the question of access to electronic content has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. In addition to publications extolling the advantages and benefits of ebooks (Long, 2003;Raskino et al, 2008;Renner, 2008) there is a growing body of literature focusing on description and comparison of various modes of access, formats and/or readers (Behler & Lush, 2011;Tees, 2010). Additionally, several recent studies looked at the challenges of electronic content adoption, integration and management by libraries of all types (Duncan, 2010;Hodges, 2010;Macicak & Schell, 2009).…”

Challenges in managing e-books collections in UK academic libraries

“…Dillon [28, p. 357] noted that once MARC records for e-books had been added to the catalogue, busage increased immediatelyQ by about 50% over 3 months. While more recent literature is in general agreement that integrating e-books into catalogues is essential for widespread use, [29, p. 345], [30, p. 54], [31] a number of participants in our study did express reservations about what they perceived as the potential limitations of using the OPAC to access e-books: I would think it was the Web site because the OPAC you don't want someone to study on it because it's a catalogue, not a machine to use to study on. {54}…”