Individuals with a computer and an internet connection can publish material on the web as a blog, an e-zine or a website. Music of commercial production quality can be produced at home on a PC or Macintosh with a few hundred pounds worth of software. A radio station might broadcast from a front room inthe Australian bush. It is possible through the internet to distribute material at almost zero cost.
E-books are a manifestation of these trends. They are a means of distributing and selling books with very low overheads. They are also a medium by which individuals with no previous access to book publishing can produce and distribute a quality product over the internet.
Additionally, as the e-book is a digital product, it is possible to embed multimedia features in the book and potentially make it even more engaging to a much wider audience than a paper book.
E-books:
An e-book is simple an electronic version of a book. There is no one standard definition beyond this. In its simplest form, an e-book is nothing more than an electronic file containing the text of an existing book. In a more complex form, it is a rich multimedia experience based around textual material.
One of the more confusing aspects of e-books is that they are available in such a variety of formats, each with its own purpose, features and particular health benefits.
Some e-books are intended simple to be just like paper books, but available on a computer or possibly a PDA. For this purpose the ideal is to be able to carry a device the size and weight of a paperback, or less, but containing a whole library of books. Other e-books are intended to do a lot more than a paper book can. For example, a complex e-book can show a film clip to accompany a textual description, or play a music file to accompany a piece of music.
Format
|
Description
|
Advantages
|
Navigation
|
Platform
|
|
|
|
Scroll only
|
All computers
| |
|
Familiar package
Easy WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) interface
|
|
Windows and Macintosh
| ||
|
|
Hyperlinks
Scroll
ToC
Bookmarks
|
| ||
| Web-based Rich multimedia multipage sites Hand crafted |
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| ||
|
|
|
| ||
|
|
|
| ||
| An encrypted streaming text format based on XML |
|
|
|
Structure and format of e-books:
Text e-books:
Text document-based e-books are the simplest form of e-book. All that is necessary is to write the text in a text editor, or scan it into text from paper using a text converter. The file format is simple text, and so all the text is inevitably in a linear form in the one document. Although this might seem overly simple, it has been used extensively for computer manuals in the past, prior to Adobe's portable document format (PDF) gaining wide acceptance. A number of e-books are still available in text format. Despite its simplicity, they have the advantage of being very easily searchable, editable and portable to almost any platform.
Word e-books:
Word document books are created using simple word-processing software and usually stored in a single word-processed document file that manages the content and layout in a proprietary format within the file. It is also possible to have hyperlinks within the document, which makes it possible to have some multimedia content.
However, the files tend to be relatively large, especially when images are embedded. As a result, this format can be useful in environments where everyone shares the same Microsoft Office software and where a number of authors might be required to collaborate simple on a project, but it is not generally used as a finishing format.
Adobe PDF e-books:
Adobe's portable document format (PDF) books are stored in a single PDF file. This format has been a "fantastic success story". Virtually all computer and software manuals are now published and distributed in this format. Websites which allow downloading of reports, newsletters and articles will almost certainly use PDF for such documents. It is also a growing medium for fully fledged e-books. The Adobe reader and the specialised e-book reader are available for free download.
To create the files a specialised writer program such as Adobe Acrobat, or one of a range of similar PDF creators, may be required. Having said this, some operating systems and software (e.g. Mac OSX) now allow direct printing of documents straight into PDF. Usually a file is created using Word, HTML or some other document creation package; then it is "printed" to PDF.
PDF has a number of features that make it very useful for the presentation of textual material. A PDF file is designed to store the text and layout in a device-independent manner so that the original full-colour print layout for text and graphics is maintained regardless of the platform being used to view the file.
Usually the file is also much smaller than the equivalent file in a word-processing package. A PDF-based e-book has a table of contents, chapters, word searching, dynamic zooming and hyperlinking are all supported. You can even embed multimedia and security features, including encryption, passwords and digital signatures. Used with Adobe Content Server, it is even possible to lend books for a set time and have them automatically deactivate after this time, thus facilitating a lending library of e-books.
The format's main strength is also a drawback. The fidelity of the PDF e-book to the original book means that it is not as flexible as the HTML solution for all situations. For example, you can change small sections of an HTML-based e-book with ease, taking out a single HTML page and/or replacing it with another.
On the other hand, changing a small part of a PDF e-book requires that the entire file be re-saved. Where a rich and alterable multimedia experience is required, the PDF may therefore not be a perfect solution.
Reader e-books:
Microsoft Reader is another free proprietary product designed to simulate reading a book as closely as possible, and gives the reader access to extra facilities, including full searching, the ability to bookmark pages and make notes, and the facility to have the book read to you. To create a Reader book it is usual to write the original content in word-processing software such as Word, and then use a converter or add-in program to convert it into the required format. The format is a single encrypted file (.lit) containing XML data structuring and the content itself.
Opening Microsoft Reader reveals your personal library. Clicking on any of the books within the library takes you to that book. If there is artwork for the book cover this will be shown for a short time and then the book front page will be shown.
This format has been devised to be the computerised equivalent of reading a book, complete with annotations, highlights and so on. Microsoft is not the only organisation to offer this type of format. Palm, Mobipocket, and others offer very similar solutions. They work very well on PCs, pocket PCs and personal digital assistants (PDAs). In fact it was hoped at one time that it would be a "killer application" for PDAs. Unlike PDF, which is essentially a file format with a small accompanying reader program, these readers are full applications that managed libraries of e-books. This makes them a more heavyweight solution than PDF. They have some advantages, in that at their best they do allow a very good simulation of the total paper-book reading experience, but as with PDF this does also restrict them when you want an e-book to be more than this.
Activity 1 - Explore an e-book:
Unleashing the Killer App is an e-book.
What is the purpose of it?
The e-book is a "progressive guide to transforming your company into a place where killer apps are born". Drawing from Larry Downes and Chunka Mui's "experience and research with leading global businesses, the authors: identify the twelve fundamental design principles for building killer apps; illustrate these principles with classic stories from history and examples from a wide range of industries that have successfully developed killer apps; examine the economic consequences of the diminishing transaction costs in cyberspace; and, describe how to integrate digital strategy into an organization's planning process to create new markets, form new customer relationships, and change the product line."
What format is it in?
The e-book is an Open e-book because it can be opened up straight onto the web and doesn't need to be downloaded as a PDF file. What is its structure?
The e-book is laid out in three chapters, each with multiple subsections covering different topics:
You can scroll, use the Table of Contents or choose a chapter. What are its strengths and weaknesses?
Strengths:
- The e-book shows, as one user said (in the reviews shown below), "examples of killer apps or ideas that have made lots of $$" - both of these are obviously very attractive to people looking to improve their business and these ideas will help.
- Some of the information discussed in the e-book is outdated which could mean that people do not want to read it so much now, instead favouring more modern e-books with up-to-date information.
Here are some reviews I found here which show that people have mixed - although mainly positive - reactions to it:
I think that Unleashing the Killer App does fulfil its purpose, despite being outdated, because most of the information discussed in the e-book on successfully transforming your business has not changed.Website e-books:
The most important and flexible format of e-book is that created as a website in HTML or XHTML format. In a web-based e-book, all the pages are created as web pages and linked together in such a way as to simulate a book experience, usually with a table of contents or chapter list and sequential page navigation. Since websites allow images, sounds, movies and animations to be included and shifted around quite simply to wherever and whenever you want them, this format is the richest and most flexible multimedia experience. In practise the flexibility of the web format means that there is a rich variety of different e-books available falling within the general category of "web based". There are simple text-based websites with page-to-page navigation. There are web books with a collection of scanned images presented with navigation to simulate moving to the next page.
A specialised version of this can be seen in the British Library's Shakespeare in quatro pages. These allow scholars to view a web facsimile of a number of the pirceless original editions of Shakespeare.
There are also websites with complex multimedia such as The Guinness Book of World Records where the web format allows a richer experience than a paper book could.
As the website is a collection of files, it is more complex to manage and thus some web-based solutions have been created which compile the site into a single .exe file. The disadvantage of this is that it adds another stage to creating the book, and the resulting file might be quite large. As it is an .exe file, it also means that some firewalls will not trust the content when an attempt is made to deliver the file as .exe files are commonly used to hide viruses and Trojan horses programs.
Open e-book format
The open e-book format takes a different web-based approach. It simplifies the structure using XML. It puts the content into a single .html file, a document definition in another (.opf) file, and the presentation styles into related CSS files. This format is most useful for books without multimedia content. As with any website structure it is a very flexible format as it can be viewed over the web or downloaded. The CSS-based approach allows for almost infinite customisation.
Activity 3 - Find out about Project Gutenberg:
Project Gutenberg offers copyright free books for you to download and use completely free of charge. There are "over 40,000 free e-books", all of them "high quality" and "published by bona fide publishers". No fee or registration is required but visitors of the website are asked to donate a small amount so that the website "can buy and digitize more books".
The website offers various formats of the same e-book - in this case, William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet - such as HTML, EPUB, Kindle, Plucker and Plain Text UTF-8, etc.
It can be argued that although all the formats discussed have a valuable role to fulfil, overall it is web-based solutions that offer the most flexible solution to a book creation and viewing. To create a web-based e-book you do not need a specialised plug in, conversion or authoring package. You can use a simple text editor, a free web editor or the web-authoring package you probably already have access to. To view the book, your readers do not need any specialised software, just the browser that comes free with virtually all computers, or as a free download from the internet.
Furthermore, a web-based book can be read either by downloading it to your computer or viewing it on the web. The use of style sheets (CSS) ensures accessibility of the e-book for different audiences on a massive range of platforms.
Additionally, the web-based solution allows e-books to be more than paper books. You can add animations, music, voice, video and more to enhance the reader's experience where appropriate. However, care must be taken as the flexibility can also lead to messy, poorly, designed e-books that lack a coherent sense of identity.
Activity 4 - Accessibility
"Accessibility is an important issue on the web, as can be seen throughout this book. Bruce Ingraham and Emma Bradburn of the University of Teesside have produced "A guide to producing readable, accessible onscreen text" which is of particular interest to e-book authors."
