119-470: An ebook (short for electronic book ), also spelled as e-book or eBook , is a book publication made available in electronic form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. Although sometimes defined as "an electronic version of a printed book", some e-books exist without a printed equivalent. E-books can be read on dedicated e-reader devices, also on any computer device that features
238-413: A page is one side of a leaf. Because the actual format of many modern books cannot be determined from examination of the books, bibliographers may not use these terms in scholarly descriptions. While some form of book illustration has existed since the invention of writing, the modern Western tradition of illustration began with 15th-century block books , in which the book's text and images were cut into
357-413: A book for the printer, the typesetting part of the job has flowed upstream, where it is done either by separately contracting companies working for the publisher, by the publishers themselves, or even by the authors. Mergers in the book manufacturing industry mean that it is now unusual to find a bindery which is not also involved in book printing (and vice versa). If the book is a hardback its path through
476-466: A book is printed, the pages are laid out on the plate so that after the printed sheet is folded the pages will be in the correct sequence. Books tend to be manufactured nowadays in a few standard sizes. The sizes of books are usually specified as "trim size": the size of the page after the sheet has been folded and trimmed. The standard sizes result from sheet sizes (therefore machine sizes) which became popular 200 or 300 years ago, and have come to dominate
595-561: A comprehensive bibliography of medical literature. In early 2000, NLM set up the PubMed Central repository, which stores full-text e-book versions of many medical journal articles and books, through co-operation with scholars and publishers in the field. Pubmed Central also now provides archiving and access to over 4.1 million articles, maintained in a standard XML format known as the Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS). Despite
714-560: A continuous roll of paper, and can consequently print more copies in a shorter time. As the production line circulates, a complete "book" is collected together in one stack of pages, and another machine carries out the folding, pleating, and stitching of the pages into bundles of signatures (sections of pages) ready to go into the gathering line. The pages of a book are printed two at a time, not as one complete book. Excess numbers are printed to make up for any spoilage due to make-readies or test pages to assure final print quality. A make-ready
833-540: A controllable viewing screen, including desktop computers , laptops , tablets and smartphones . In the 2000s, there was a trend of print and e-book sales moving to the Internet , where readers buy traditional paper books and e-books on websites using e-commerce systems. With print books, readers are increasingly browsing through images of the covers of books on publisher or bookstore websites and selecting and ordering titles online. The paper books are then delivered to
952-456: A cover. By extension, book refers to a physical book's written, printed, or graphic contents. A single part or division of a longer written work may also be called a book , especially for some works composed in antiquity: each part of Aristotle 's Physics , for example, is a book. It is difficult to create a precise definition of the book that clearly delineates it from other kinds of written material across time and culture. The meaning of
1071-404: A definite number of volumes (such as a multi-volume novel), in contrast to serial or periodical publications . The history of books became an acknowledged academic discipline in the 1980s. Contributions to the field have come from textual scholarship , codicology , bibliography , philology , palaeography , art history , social history and cultural history . It aims to demonstrate that
1190-494: A form with defined boundaries; and "information architecture" like linear structure and certain textual elements) that form a "hierarchy of the book", in which formats that fulfill more criteria are considered more similar to the traditional printed book. Although in academic language a monograph is a specialist work on a single subject, in library and information science the term is used more broadly to mean any non-serial publication complete in one volume (a physical book) or
1309-530: A freeware HyperCard stack, called EBook, that allowed easy import of any text file to create a pageable version similar to an electronic paperback book. A notable feature was automatic tracking of the last page read so that on returning to the 'book' you were taken back to where you had previously left off reading. The title of this stack may have helped popularize the term 'ebook'. As e-book formats emerged and proliferated, some garnered support from major software companies, such as Adobe with its PDF format that
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#17330849085051428-482: A hole through which a string could pass, and with these the sheets were tied together with a string to bind like a book. In woodblock printing, a relief image of an entire page is carved into blocks of wood, inked, and used to print copies of that page. It originated in the Han dynasty before 220 AD, used to print textiles and later paper, and was widely used throughout East Asia . The oldest dated book printed by this method
1547-440: A lack of privacy for the user's e-book reading activities. For example, Amazon knows the user's identity, what the user is reading, whether the user has finished the book, what page the user is on, how long the user has spent on each page, and which passages the user may have highlighted. One obstacle to wide adoption of the e-book is that a large portion of people value the printed book as an object itself, including aspects such as
1666-461: A layer of whitewash applied before writing. New World codices were written as late as the 16th century (see Maya codices and Aztec codices ). Those written before the Spanish conquests seem all to have been single long sheets folded concertina-style, sometimes written on both sides of the local amatl paper. Manuscripts, handwritten and hand-copied documents, were the only form of writing before
1785-700: A library purchases an e-book license, the cost is at least three times what it would be for a personal consumer. E-book licenses are more expensive than paper-format editions because publishers are concerned that an e-book that is sold could theoretically be read and/or checked out by a huge number of users, potentially damaging sales. However, some studies have found the opposite effect to be true (for example, Hilton and Wikey 2010). The Internet Archive and Open Library offer more than six million fully accessible public domain e-books. Project Gutenberg has over 52,000 freely available public domain e-books. An e-reader , also called an e-book reader or e-book device ,
1904-517: A number of social consequences, including censorship . The modern book industry has seen several major changes due to new technologies, including ebooks and audiobooks (recordings of books being read aloud). Awareness of the needs of print-disabled people has led to a rise in formats designed for greater accessibility , such as braille printing and large-print editions. Google Books estimated in 2010 that approximately 130 million total unique books had been published. The word book comes from
2023-411: A paragraph or more. The size of a book is generally measured by the height against the width of a leaf, or sometimes the height and width of its cover. A series of terms commonly used by contemporary libraries and publishers for the general sizes of modern books ranges from folio (the largest), to quarto (smaller) and octavo (still smaller). Historically, these terms referred to the format of
2142-547: A particular book. The earliest forms of writing were etched on tablets, transitioning to palm leaves and papyrus in ancient times. Parchment and paper later emerged as important substrates for bookmaking, introducing greater durability and accessibility. Across regions like China , the Middle East , Europe , and South Asia , diverse methods of book production evolved. The Middle Ages saw the rise of illuminated manuscripts, intricately blending text and imagery, particularly during
2261-406: A publishing company in order to be put on the market by distributors and bookstores. The publisher negotiates a formal legal agreement with authors in order to obtain the copyright to works, then arranges for them to be produced and sold. The major steps of the publishing process are: editing and proofreading the work to be published; designing the printed book; manufacturing the books; and selling
2380-514: A remix of a familiar song. The inventor of the first e-book is not widely agreed upon. Some notable candidates include the following: The first e-book may be the Index Thomisticus , a heavily annotated electronic index to the works of Thomas Aquinas , prepared by Roberto Busa , S.J. beginning in 1946 and completed in the 1970s. Although originally stored on a single computer, a distributable CD-ROM version appeared in 1989. However, this work
2499-516: A set of multimedia formats (others could be used, but there must also be a fallback in one of the required formats), and an XML schema for a "manifest", to list the components of a given e-book, identify a table of contents, cover art, and so on. This format led to the open format EPUB . Google Books has converted many public domain works to this open format. In 2010, e-books continued to gain in their own specialist and underground markets. Many e-book publishers began distributing books that were in
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#17330849085052618-704: A team of female keypunch operators. Their dedication and precision were instrumental in the success of the project. This work of punching the text was made between 1950 and 1966. They worked in Gallarate , Italy, and the project peaked in size in 1962 with 70 workers. After the punching was complete, the data was lemmatised in a semi-automatic process. The completed project indexed a total of 10,631,980 words in fifty-six volumes over 70,000 pages—divided into ten volumes of indexes, followed by thirty-one volumes of concordances of Aquinas's works, eight volumes of concordances of related authors, and seven volumes that reprinted
2737-598: A word while reading. A 2017 study found that even when accounting for the emissions created in manufacturing the e-reader device, substituting more than 4.7 print books a year resulted in less greenhouse gas emissions than print. While an e-reader costs more than most individual books, e-books may have a lower cost than paper books. E-books may be made available for less than the price of traditional books using on-demand book printers . Moreover, numerous e-books are available online free of charge on sites such as Project Gutenberg . For example, all books printed before 1928 are in
2856-460: A work: for example, it may contain only drawings, engravings, photographs, puzzles, or removable content like paper dolls . It may also be left empty for personal use, as in the case of account books , appointment books, autograph books , notebooks , diaries and sketchbooks . Books are sold at both regular stores and specialized bookstores, as well as online for delivery, and can be borrowed from libraries . The reception of books has led to
2975-624: A year before. At the end of the first quarter of 2012, e-book sales in the United States surpassed hardcover book sales for the first time. Until late 2013, use of an e-reader was not allowed on airplanes during takeoff and landing by the FAA . In November 2013, the FAA allowed use of e-readers on airplanes at all times if it is in Airplane Mode, which means all radios turned off, and Europe followed this guidance
3094-715: Is The Diamond Sutra (868 AD). The method (called woodcut when used in art) arrived in Europe in the early 14th century. Books (known as block-books ), as well as playing-cards and religious pictures , began to be produced by this method. Creating an entire book was a painstaking process, requiring a hand-carved block for each page, and the wooden blocks could crack if stored for too long. The Chinese inventor Bi Sheng made movable type of earthenware c. 1045 , but there are no known surviving examples of his printing. Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg independently invented movable type in Europe, along with innovations in casting
3213-516: Is a mobile electronic device that is designed primarily for the purpose of reading e-books and digital periodicals. An e-reader is similar in form, but more limited in purpose than a tablet . In comparison to tablets, many e-readers are better than tablets for reading because they are more portable, have better readability in sunlight and have longer battery life. In July 2010, online bookseller Amazon.com reported sales of e-books for its proprietary Kindle , outnumbered sales of hardcover books for
3332-608: Is a possible precursor of modern bound books. The etymology of the word codex (block of wood) suggests that it may have developed from wooden wax tablets. Scrolls made from papyrus were first used for writing in Ancient Egypt , perhaps as early as the First Dynasty , although the earliest evidence is from the account books of King Neferirkare Kakai of the Fifth Dynasty (about 2400 BC). According to Herodotus (History 5:58),
3451-419: Is designed specifically for reading e-books is called an "e-reader", "ebook device", or "eReader". Some trace the concept of an e-reader, a device that would enable the user to view books on a screen, to a 1930 manifesto by Bob Brown , written after watching his first " talkie " (movie with sound). He titled it The Readies , playing off the idea of the "talkie". In his book, Brown says movies have outmaneuvered
3570-453: Is from Martial , in his Apophoreta CLXXXIV at the end of the first century, where he praises its compactness. However, the codex never gained much popularity in the pagan Hellenistic world, and only within the Christian community did it gain widespread use. This change happened gradually during the 3rd and 4th centuries, and the reasons for adopting the codex form of the book were several:
3689-444: Is generally thought to have coined the term "electronic book", and it was established enough to use in an article title by 1985. FRESS was used for reading extensive primary texts online, as well as for annotation and online discussions in several courses, including English Poetry and Biochemistry. Brown's faculty made extensive use of FRESS. For example the philosopher Roderick Chisholm used it to produce several of his books. Thus in
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3808-509: Is given by UNESCO : for the purpose of recording national statistics on book production, it recommended that a book be defined as "a non-periodical printed publication of at least 49 pages, exclusive of the cover pages, published in the country and made available to the public", distinguishing them from other written material such as pamphlets . Kovač et al. have critiqued this definition for failing to account for new digital formats. They propose four criteria (a minimum length; textual content;
3927-704: Is sometimes omitted. Maybe this is because the digitized text was a means for studying written texts and developing linguistic concordances, rather than as a published edition in its own right. In 2005, the Index was published online. In 1949, Ángela Ruiz Robles , a teacher from Ferrol, Spain , patented the Enciclopedia Mecánica , or the Mechanical Encyclopedia, a mechanical device which operated on compressed air where text and graphics were contained on spools that users would load onto rotating spindles. Her idea
4046-498: Is the book's front matter , which includes all textual material after the front cover but not part of the book's content such as a foreword, a dedication, a table of contents and publisher data such as the book's edition or printing number and place of publication. Between the body copy and the back cover goes the end matter which would include any indices, sets of tables, diagrams, glossaries or lists of cited works (though an edited book with several authors usually places cited works at
4165-452: Is the preparatory work carried out by the pressmen to get the printing press up to the required quality of impression . Included in make-ready is the time taken to mount the plate onto the machine, clean up any mess from the previous job, and get the press up to speed. As soon as the pressman decides that the printing is correct, all the make-ready sheets will be discarded, and the press will start making books. Similar make readies take place in
4284-518: Is time to pull out the stopper" and begin "a bloody revolution of the word," introducing huge numbers of portmanteau symbols to replace normal words, and punctuation to simulate action or movement, so it is not clear whether this fits into the history of "e-books" or not. Later e-readers never followed a model at all like Brown's. However, he correctly predicted the miniaturization and portability of e-readers. In an article, Jennifer Schuessler writes: "The machine, Brown argued, would allow readers to adjust
4403-492: The Internet Archive , in formats that many e-readers support, such as PDF , TXT , and EPUB . Books in other formats may be converted to an e-reader-compatible format using e-book writing software, for example Calibre . A vBook is an eBook that is digital first media with embedded video , images , graphs , tables , text , and other useful media . Book A book is a medium for recording information in
4522-516: The Old English bōc , which in turn likely comes from the Germanic root * bōk- , cognate to " beech ". In Slavic languages like Russian , Bulgarian , Macedonian буква bukva —"letter" is cognate with "beech". In Russian , Serbian and Macedonian , the word букварь ( bukvar' ) or буквар ( bukvar ) refers to a primary school textbook that helps young children master
4641-782: The Phoenicians brought writing and papyrus to Greece around the 10th or 9th century BC. Whether made from papyrus, parchment, or paper, scrolls were the dominant writing medium in the Hellenistic , Roman, Chinese, Hebrew , and Macedonian cultures. The codex dominated in the Roman world by late antiquity , but scrolls persisted much longer in Asia. The codex is the ancestor of the modern book, consisting of sheets of uniform size bound along one edge and typically held between two covers made of some more robust material. Isidore of Seville (died 636) explained
4760-520: The United States Declaration of Independence into a computer in plain text. Hart planned to create documents using plain text to make them as easy as possible to download and view on devices. After Hart first adapted the U.S. Declaration of Independence into an electronic document in 1971, Project Gutenberg was launched to create electronic copies of more texts, especially books. Dedicated hardware devices for ebook reading began to appear in
4879-467: The internet means that new information is often published online rather than in printed books, for example through a digital library . " Print on demand " technologies, which make it possible to print as few as one book at a time, have made self-publishing (and vanity publishing ) much easier and more affordable, and has allowed publishers to keep low-selling books in print rather than declaring them out of print. Presently, books are typically produced by
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4998-498: The public domain in the United States, which enables websites to host ebook versions of such titles for free. Depending on possible digital rights management , e-books (unlike physical books) can be backed up and recovered in the case of loss or damage to the device on which they are stored, a new copy can be downloaded without incurring an additional cost from the distributor. Readers can synchronize their reading location, highlights and bookmarks across several devices. There may be
5117-416: The public domain . At the same time, authors with books that were not accepted by publishers offered their works online so they could be seen by others. Unofficial (and occasionally unauthorized) catalogs of books became available on the web, and sites devoted to e-books began disseminating information about e-books to the public. Nearly two-thirds of the U.S. Consumer e-book publishing market are controlled by
5236-518: The "Big Five". The "Big Five" publishers are: Hachette , HarperCollins , Macmillan , Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster . U.S. libraries began to offer free e-books to the public in 1998 through their websites and associated services, although the e-books were primarily scholarly, technical, or professional in nature, and could not be downloaded. In 2003, libraries began offering free downloadable popular fiction and non-fiction e-books to
5355-540: The 70s and 80s, in addition to the main frame and laptop solutions, and collections of data per se. One early e-book implementation was the desktop prototype for a proposed notebook computer, the Dynabook , in the 1970s at PARC : a general-purpose portable personal computer capable of displaying books for reading. In 1980, the U.S. Department of Defense began a concept development for a portable electronic delivery device for technical maintenance information called project PEAM,
5474-522: The Association of American Publishers' annual report 2019. In 2013, Carrenho estimates that e-books would have a 15% market share in Spain in 2015. According to Nielsen Book Research, e-book share went up from 20% to 33% between 2012 and 2014, but down to 29% in the first quarter of 2015. Amazon-published and self-published titles accounted for 17 million of those books (worth £58m) in 2014, representing 5% of
5593-493: The Future . Early e-books were generally written for specialty areas and a limited audience, meant to be read only by small and devoted interest groups. The scope of the subject matter of these e-books included technical manuals for hardware, manufacturing techniques, and other subjects. In the 1990s, the general availability of the Internet made transferring electronic files much easier, including e-books. In 1993, Paul Baim released
5712-781: The Mughal era in South Asia under the patronage of rulers like Akbar and Shah Jahan. Prior to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, made famous by the Gutenberg Bible , each text was a unique handcrafted valuable article, personalized through the design features incorporated by the scribe, owner, bookbinder, and illustrator. Its creation marked a pivotal moment for book production. Innovations like movable type and steam-powered presses accelerated manufacturing processes and contributed to increased literacy rates. Copyright protection also emerged, securing authors' rights and shaping
5831-575: The PEAM device, titled "Apparatus for delivering procedural type instructions", was submitted by Texas Instruments on December 4, 1985, listing John K. Harkins and Stephen H. Morriss as inventors. In 1992, Sony launched the Data Discman , an electronic book reader that could read e-books that were stored on CDs. One of the electronic publications that could be played on the Data Discman was called Library of
5950-632: The Portable Electronic Aid for Maintenance. Detailed specifications were completed in FY 1981/82, and prototype development began with Texas Instruments that same year. Four prototypes were produced and delivered for testing in 1986, and tests were completed in 1987. The final summary report was produced in 1989 by the U.S. Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences, authored by Robert Wisher and J. Peter Kincaid . A patent application for
6069-485: The Preface to Person and Object (1979) he writes: "The book would not have been completed without the epoch-making File Retrieval and Editing System..." Brown University's work in electronic book systems continued for many years, including US Navy funded projects for electronic repair-manuals; a large-scale distributed hypermedia system known as InterMedia; a spinoff company Electronic Book Technologies that built DynaText ,
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#17330849085056188-583: The TEI approach. In the late 1990s, a consortium formed to develop the Open eBook format as a way for authors and publishers to provide a single source-document which many book-reading software and hardware platforms could handle. Several scholars from the TEI were closely involved in the early development of Open eBook , including Allen Renear , Elli Mylonas , and Steven DeRose , all from Brown. Focused on portability, Open eBook as defined required subsets of XHTML and CSS ;
6307-433: The U.S. were offering e-books, and a large movement in the library industry began to seriously examine the issues relating to e-book lending, acknowledging a " tipping point " when e-book technology would become widely established. Content from public libraries can be downloaded to e-readers using application software like Overdrive and Hoopla . The U.S. National Library of Medicine has for many years provided PubMed ,
6426-566: The U.S., the amount of e-book reading is increasing. By 2014, 28% of adults had read an e-book, compared to 23% in 2013. By 2014, 50% of American adults had an e-reader or a tablet , compared to 30% owning such devices in 2013. Besides published books and magazines that have a digital equivalent, there are also digital textbooks that are intended to serve as the text for a class and help in technology-based education. E-books are also referred to as "ebooks", "eBooks", "Ebooks", "e-Books", "e-journals", "e-editions", or "digital books". A device that
6545-441: The absence of make readies and of spoilage. Digital printing has opened up the possibility of print-on-demand, where no books are printed until after an order is received from a customer. After the signatures are folded and gathered, they move into the bindery . In the middle of last century there were still many trade binders—stand-alone binding companies which did no printing, specializing in binding alone. At that time, because of
6664-410: The acquisition process by offering to match a library's selection profile to the vendor's e-book titles. The library's catalog is then populated with records for all of the e-books that match the profile. The decision to purchase the title is left to the patrons, although the library can set purchasing conditions such as a maximum price and purchasing caps so that the dedicated funds are spent according to
6783-412: The bindery will involve more points of activity than if it is a paperback. Unsewn binding is now increasingly common. The signatures of a book can also be held together by " Smyth sewing " using needles, "McCain sewing", using drilled holes often used in schoolbook binding, or "notch binding", where gashes about an inch long are made at intervals through the fold in the spine of each signature. The rest of
6902-399: The binding process is similar in all instances. Sewn and notch bound books can be bound as either hardbacks or paperbacks. "Making cases" happens off-line and prior to the book's arrival at the binding line. In the most basic case-making, two pieces of cardboard are placed onto a glued piece of cloth with a space between them into which is glued a thinner board cut to the width of the spine of
7021-402: The book as an object, not just the text contained within it, is a conduit of interaction between readers and words. Analysis of each component part of the book can reveal its purpose, where and how it was kept, who read it, ideological and religious beliefs of the period, and whether readers interacted with the text within. Even a lack of such evidence can leave valuable clues about the nature of
7140-410: The book by creating the "talkies" and, as a result, reading should find a new medium: A simple reading machine which I can carry or move around, attach to any old electric light plug and read hundred-thousand-word novels in 10 minutes if I want to, and I want to. Brown's notion, however, was much more focused on reforming orthography and vocabulary, than on medium. He says: "It
7259-400: The book on the default device or application, even if it has insufficient functionality. While a paper book is vulnerable to various threats, including water damage, mold and theft, e-books files may be corrupted, deleted or otherwise lost as well as pirated . Where the ownership of a paper book is fairly straightforward (albeit subject to restrictions on renting or copying pages, depending on
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#17330849085057378-508: The book), the purchaser of an e-book's digital file has conditional access with the possible loss of access to the e-book due to digital rights management provisions, copyright issues, the provider's business failing or possibly if the user's credit card expired. According to the Association of American Publishers 2018 annual report, ebooks accounted for 12.4% of the total trade revenue. Publishers of books in all formats made $ 22.6 billion in print form and $ 2.04 billion in e-books, according to
7497-430: The book, a technical term used by printers and bibliographers to indicate the size of a leaf in terms of the size of the original sheet. For example, a quarto was a book printed on sheets of paper folded in half twice, with the first fold at right angles to the second, to produce 4 leaves (or 8 pages), each leaf one fourth the size of the original sheet printed – note that a leaf refers to the single piece of paper, whereas
7616-518: The book. The overlapping edges of the cloth (about 5/8" all round) are folded over the boards, and pressed down to adhere. After case-making the stack of cases will go to the foil stamping area for adding decorations and type. Bookselling is the commercial trading of books that forms the retail and distribution end of the publishing process. Accessible publishing is an approach to publishing and book design whereby books and other texts are made available in alternative formats designed to aid or replace
7735-570: The books, including marketing and promotion. Each of these steps is usually taken on by third-party companies paid by the publisher. This is in contrast to self-publishing , where an author pays for the production and distribution of their own work and manages some or all steps of the publishing process. English-language publishing is currently dominated by the so-called "Big Five" publishers: Penguin Random House , Hachette Book Group , HarperCollins , Simon & Schuster , and Macmillan Publishers . They were estimated to make up almost 60 percent of
7854-425: The company, to work with Busa. Busa selected 179 texts centering around Thomas Aquinas that would be put into a form that was machine-readable . 118 of the works were written by Aquinas, and the remaining 61 items were either at one point mis-attributed to him or an attempt to complete an unfinished work begun by Aquinas. A significant part of the project was the data entry , which was meticulously carried out by
7973-468: The device, an e-book may be readable in low light or even total darkness. Many e-readers have a built-in light source, can enlarge or change fonts, use text-to-speech software to read the text aloud for visually impaired, elderly or dyslexic people or just for convenience. Additionally, e-readers allow readers to look up words or find more information about the topic immediately using an online dictionary. Amazon reports that 85% of its e-book readers look up
8092-458: The dominance of letterpress printing, typesetting and printing took place in one location, and binding in a different factory. When type was all metal, a typical book's worth of type would be bulky, fragile and heavy. The less it was moved in this condition the better: so printing would be carried out in the same location as the typesetting. Printed sheets on the other hand could easily be moved. Now, because of increasing computerization of preparing
8211-662: The earliest written records were made on tablets. Clay tablets (flattened pieces of clay impressed with a stylus ) were used in the Ancient Near East throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age , especially for writing in cuneiform . Wax tablets (pieces of wood covered in a layer of wax) were used in classical antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages . The custom of binding several wax tablets together (Roman pugillares )
8330-685: The early 1960s, with the NLS project headed by Douglas Engelbart at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), and the Hypertext Editing System and FRESS projects headed by Andries van Dam at Brown University . FRESS documents ran on IBM main frames and were structure-oriented rather than line-oriented. They were formatted dynamically for different users, display hardware, window sizes, and so on, as well as having automated tables of contents, indexes, and so on. All these systems also provided extensive hyperlinking , graphics, and other capabilities. Van Dam
8449-415: The emotional and habitual aspects, there are also some readability and usability issues that need to be addressed by publishers and software developers. Many e-book readers who complain about eyestrain, lack of overview and distractions could be helped if they could use a more suitable device or a more user-friendly reading application, but when they buy or borrow a DRM-protected e-book, they often have to read
8568-483: The end of each authored chapter). The inside back cover page, like that inside the front cover, is usually blank. The back cover is the usual place for the book's ISBN and maybe a photograph of the author(s)/ editor(s), perhaps with a short introduction to them. Also here often appear plot summaries, barcodes and excerpted reviews of the book. The body of the books is usually divided into parts, chapters, sections and sometimes subsections that are composed of at least
8687-573: The end of the Middle Ages, the papal library in Avignon and Paris library of the Sorbonne held only around 2,000 volumes. The rise of universities in the 13th century led to an increased demand for books, and a new system for copying appeared. The books were divided into unbound leaves ( pecia ), which were lent out to different copyists, so the speed of book production was considerably increased. The system
8806-625: The first SGML -based e-reader system; and the Scholarly Technology Group's extensive work on the Open eBook standard. Despite the extensive earlier history, several publications report Michael S. Hart as the inventor of the e-book. In 1971, the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the University of Illinois gave Hart extensive computer time. Seeking a worthy use of this resource, he created his first electronic document by typing
8925-461: The first time ever during the second quarter of 2010, saying it sold 140 e-books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there was no digital edition . By January 2011, e-book sales at Amazon had surpassed its paperback sales. In the overall US market, paperback book sales are still much larger than either hardcover or e-book. The American Publishing Association estimated e-books represented 8.5% of sales as of mid-2010, up from 3%
9044-410: The first two decades of the 21st century, difficulties keep libraries from providing some e-books to clients. Publishers will sell e-books to libraries, but in most cases they will only give libraries a limited license to the title, meaning that the library does not own the electronic text but is allowed to circulate it for either a certain period of time, or a certain number of check outs, or both. When
9163-424: The folding and binding areas, each involving spoilage of paper. Recent developments in book manufacturing include the development of digital printing. Book pages are printed, in much the same way as an office copier works, using toner rather than ink. Each book is printed in one pass, not as separate signatures. Digital printing has permitted the manufacture of much smaller quantities than offset, in part because of
9282-702: The form of writing or images. Modern books are typically in codex format, composed of many pages that are bound together and protected by a cover ; they were preceded by several earlier formats, including the scroll and the tablet . The book publishing process is the series of steps involved in their creation and dissemination. As a conceptual object, a book refers to a written work of substantial length, which may be distributed either physically or digitally as an ebook . These works can be broadly classified into fiction (containing invented content, often narratives) and non-fiction (containing content intended as factual truth). A physical book may not contain such
9401-521: The format was more economical than the scroll, as both sides of the writing material can be used; and it was portable, searchable, and easier to conceal. The Christian authors may also have wanted to distinguish their writings from the pagan and Judaic texts written on scrolls. The codices of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica had the same form as the European codex, but were instead made with long folded strips of either fig bark ( amatl ) or plant fibers, often with
9520-478: The fractured market of independent publishers and specialty authors lacked consensus regarding a standard for packaging and selling e-books. Meanwhile, scholars formed the Text Encoding Initiative , which developed consensus guidelines for encoding books and other materials of scholarly interest for a variety of analytic uses as well as reading. Countless literary and other works have been developed using
9639-426: The go with mobile devices) and a larger selection of titles. With e-books, "electronic bookmarks make referencing easier, and e-book readers may allow the user to annotate pages." "Although fiction and non-fiction books come in e-book formats, technical material is especially suited for e-book delivery because it can be digitally searched" for keywords. In addition, for programming books, code examples can be copied. In
9758-882: The industry. British conventions in this regard prevail throughout the English-speaking world, except for the US. The European book manufacturing industry works to a completely different set of standards. Hardcover books have a stiff binding, while paperback books have cheaper, flexible covers which tend to be less durable. Publishers may produce low-cost pre-publication copies known as galleys or "bound proofs" for promotional purposes, such as generating reviews in advance of publication. Galleys are usually made as cheaply as possible, since they are not intended for sale. Some books, particularly those with shorter runs (i.e. with fewer copies) will be printed on sheet-fed offset presses, but most books are now printed on web presses , which are fed by
9877-470: The invention and widespread adoption of print. Advances were made in the techniques used to create them. In the early Western Roman Empire , monasteries continued Latin writing traditions related to Christianity , and the clergy were the predominant readers and copyists. The bookmaking process was long and laborious. They were usually written on parchment or vellum , writing surfaces made from processed animal skin. The parchment had to be prepared, then
9996-425: The late 19th century. They could set more than 6,000 letters per hour and an entire line of type at once. There have been numerous improvements in the printing press. In mid-20th century, European book production had risen to over 200,000 titles per year. During the 20th century, libraries faced an ever-increasing rate of publishing, sometimes called an information explosion . The advent of electronic publishing and
10115-549: The library's budget. The 2012 meeting of the Association of American University Presses included a panel on the PDA of books produced by university presses, based on a preliminary report by Joseph Esposito, a digital publishing consultant who has studied the implications of PDA with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation . Although the demand for e-book services in libraries has grown in
10234-401: The market for general-readership books in 2021. Book design is the art of incorporating the content, style, format, design, and sequence of the various elements of a book into a coherent unit. Modern books are organized according to a particular format called the book's layout . Although there is great variation in layout, modern books tend to adhere to a set of rules with regard to what
10353-523: The next month. In 2014, The New York Times predicted that by 2018 e-books will make up over 50% of total consumer publishing revenue in the United States and Great Britain. Some of the major book retailers and multiple third-party developers offer free (and in some third-party cases, premium paid) e-reader software applications (apps) for the Mac and PC computers as well as for Android , Blackberry , iPad , iPhone , Windows Phone and Palm OS devices to allow
10472-423: The overall book market and 15% of the digital market. The volume and value sales, although similar to 2013, had seen a 70% increase since 2012. The Wischenbart Report 2015 estimates the e-book market share to be 4.3%. The Brazilian e-book market is only emerging. Brazilians are technology savvy, and that attitude is shared by the government. In 2013, around 2.5% of all trade titles sold were in digital format. This
10591-433: The parts of the layout are and what their content usually includes. A basic layout will include a front cover , a back cover and the book's content which is called its body copy or content pages . The front cover often bears the book's title (and subtitle, if any) and the name of its author or editor(s). The inside front cover page is usually left blank in both hardcover and paperback books. The next section, if present,
10710-478: The popularity of ereaders and accessibility features. While discussions about the potential decline of physical books have surfaced, print media has proven remarkably resilient, continuing to thrive as a multi-billion dollar industry. Additionally, efforts to make literature more inclusive emerged, with the development of Braille for the visually impaired and the creation of spoken books, providing alternative ways for individuals to access and enjoy literature. Some of
10829-524: The possible implications of the digital rights management tied to their products. Generally, they claim that digital rights management is meant to prevent illegal copying of the e-book. However, in many cases, it is also possible that digital rights management will result in the complete denial of access by the purchaser to the e-book. The e-books sold by most major publishers and electronic retailers, which are Amazon.com , Google , Barnes & Noble , Kobo Inc. and Apple Inc. , are DRM-protected and tied to
10948-523: The print format and later if the author wishes an electronic version is produced. The New York Times keeps a list of best-selling e-books, for both fiction and non-fiction. All of the e-readers and reading apps are capable of tracking e-book reading data, and what the data could contain which e-books users open, how long the users spend reading each e-book and how much of each e-book is finished. In December 2014, Kobo released e-book reading data collected from over 21 million of its users worldwide. Some of
11067-482: The pros and cons of e-books: Electronic books are ideal for people who value the information contained in them, or who have vision problems, or who like to read on the subway, or who do not want other people to see how they are amusing themselves, or who have storage and clutter issues, but they are useless for people who are engaged in an intense, lifelong love affair with books. Books that we can touch; books that we can smell; books that we can depend on. Apart from all
11186-497: The public, launching an e-book lending model that worked much more successfully for public libraries. The number of library e-book distributors and lending models continued to increase over the next few years. From 2005 to 2008, libraries experienced a 60% growth in e-book collections. In 2010, a Public Library Funding and Technology Access Study by the American Library Association found that 66% of public libraries in
11305-597: The publisher's e-reader software or hardware. The first major publisher to omit DRM was Tor Books , one of the largest publishers of science fiction and fantasy, in 2012. Smaller e-book publishers such as O'Reilly Media , Carina Press and Baen Books had already forgone DRM previously. Some e-books are produced simultaneously with the production of a printed format, as described in electronic publishing , though in many instances they may not be put on sale until later. Often, e-books are produced from pre-existing hard-copy books, generally by document scanning , sometimes with
11424-409: The publisher. It is possible to release an e-book chapter by chapter as each chapter is written. This is useful in fields such as information technology where topics can change quickly in the months that it takes to write a typical book. It is also possible to convert an electronic book to a printed book by print on demand . However, these are exceptions as tradition dictates that a book be launched in
11543-400: The publishing landscape. The Late Modern Period introduced chapbooks , catering to a wider range of readers, and mechanization of the printing process further enhanced efficiency. The 20th century witnessed the advent of typewriters, computers, and desktop publishing, transforming document creation and printing. Digital advancements in the 21st century led to the rise of ebooks, propelled by
11662-440: The reader by mail or any other delivery service. With e-books, users can browse through titles online, select and order titles, then the e-book can be sent to them online or the user can download the e-book. By the early 2010s, e-books had begun to overtake hardcover by overall publication figures in the U.S. The main reasons people buy e-books are possibly because of lower prices, increased comfort (as they can buy from home or on
11781-523: The reading of e-books and other documents independently of dedicated e-book devices. Examples are apps for the Amazon Kindle , Barnes & Noble Nook , iBooks , Kobo eReader and Sony Reader . Writers and publishers have many formats to choose from when publishing e-books. Each format has advantages and disadvantages. The most popular e-readers and their natively supported formats are shown below: Most e-book publishers do not warn their customers about
11900-434: The reading process. It is particularly relevant for people who are blind, visually impaired or otherwise print-disabled . Alternative formats that have been developed to aid different people to read include varieties of larger fonts , specialized fonts for certain kinds of reading disabilities , braille, ebooks, and automated audiobooks and DAISY digital talking books. Index Thomisticus The Index Thomisticus
12019-497: The results were that only 44.4% of UK readers finished the bestselling e-book The Goldfinch and the 2014 top selling e-book in the UK, "One Cold Night", was finished by 69% of readers. This is evidence that while popular e-books are being completely read, some e-books are only sampled. In the space that a comparably sized physical book takes up, an e-reader can contain thousands of e-books, limited only by its memory capacity. Depending on
12138-577: The same block. Techniques such as engraving , etching , and lithography have also been influential. The methods used for the printing and binding of books continued fundamentally unchanged from the 15th century into the early 20th century. While there was more mechanization , a book printer in 1900 still used movable metal type assembled into words, lines, and pages to create copies. Modern paper books are printed on paper designed specifically for printing . Traditionally, book papers are off-white or low-white papers (easier to read), are opaque to minimize
12257-445: The show-through of text from one side of the page to the other and are (usually) made to tighter caliper or thickness specifications, particularly for case-bound books. Different paper qualities are used depending on the type of book: Machine finished coated papers , woodfree uncoated papers , coated fine papers and special fine papers are common paper grades. Today, the majority of books are printed by offset lithography . When
12376-402: The source texts. The seven completely reprinting the source texts were sold separately. The first volume was published in 1974, and publication was completed in 1980. The project used a total of 1,500 kilometres (930 mi) of tape and it took an estimated 10,000 hours of computer work and 1 million hours of human work to complete. The Index was released on CD-ROM in 1992 and a website
12495-537: The techniques of reading and writing. It is thus conjectured that the earliest Indo-European writings may have been carved on beech wood. The Latin word codex , meaning a book in the modern sense (bound and with separate leaves), originally meant "block of wood". An avid reader or collector of books is a bibliophile , or colloquially a "bookworm". In its modern incarnation, a book is typically composed of many pages (commonly of paper , parchment , or vellum ) that are bound together along one edge and protected by
12614-706: The term has changed substantially over time with the evolution of communication media. Historian of books James Raven has suggested that when studying how books have been used to communicate, they should be defined in a broadly inclusive way as "portable, durable, replicable and legible" means of recording and disseminating information, rather than relying on physical or contextual features. This would include, for example, ebooks, newspapers , and quipus (a form of knot-based recording historically used by cultures in Andean South America ), but not objects fixed in place such as inscribed monuments. A stricter definition
12733-402: The texture, smell, weight and appearance on the shelf. Print books are also considered valuable cultural items, and symbols of liberal education and the humanities . Kobo found that 60% of e-books that are purchased from their e-book store are never opened and found that the more expensive the book is, the more likely the reader would at least open the e-book. Joe Queenan has written about
12852-401: The then-current relation between a codex, book, and scroll in his Etymologiae (VI.13): "A codex is composed of many books; a book is of one scroll. It is called codex by way of metaphor from the trunks ( codex ) of trees or vines, as if it were a wooden stock, because it contains in itself a multitude of books, as it were of branches". The first written mention of the codex as a form of book
12971-508: The type based on a matrix and hand mould . This invention gradually made books less expensive to produce and more widely available. Early printed books, single sheets and images which were created before 1501 in Europe are known as incunables or incunabula . Steam-powered printing presses became popular in the early 19th century. These machines could print 1,100 sheets per hour, but workers could only set 2,000 letters per hour. Monotype and linotype typesetting machines were introduced in
13090-404: The type size, avoid paper cuts and save trees, all while hastening the day when words could be 'recorded directly on the palpitating ether.'" Brown believed that the e-reader (and his notions for changing the text itself) would bring a completely new life to reading. Schuessler correlates it with a DJ spinning bits of old songs to create a beat or an entirely new song, as opposed to just
13209-449: The unbound pages were planned and ruled with a blunt tool or lead, after which the text was written by a scribe , who usually left blank areas for illustration and rubrication . Finally, it was bound by a bookbinder. Because of the difficulties involved in making and copying books, they were expensive and rare. Smaller monasteries usually had only a few dozen books. By the 9th century, larger collections held around 500 volumes and even at
13328-410: The use of robotic book scanners , having the technology to quickly scan books without damaging the original print edition. Scanning a book produces a set of image files, which may additionally be converted into text format by an OCR program. Occasionally, as in some projects, an e-book may be produced by re-entering the text from a keyboard. Sometimes only the electronic version of a book is produced by
13447-645: The widespread adoption of e-books, some publishers and authors have not endorsed the concept of electronic publishing , citing issues with user demand, copyright infringement and challenges with proprietary devices and systems. In a survey of interlibrary loan (ILL) librarians, it was found that 92% of libraries held e-books in their collections and that 27% of those libraries had negotiated ILL rights for some of their e-books. This survey found significant barriers to conducting interlibrary loan for e-books. Patron-driven acquisition (PDA) has been available for several years in public libraries, allowing vendors to streamline
13566-471: Was a digital humanities project begun in the 1940s that created a concordance to 179 texts centering around Thomas Aquinas . Led by Roberto Busa , the project indexed 10,631,980 words over the course of 34 years, initially onto punched cards . It is considered a pioneering project in the field of digital humanities. Busa began the project in 1946. In 1949, IBM agreed to sponsor the project until its completion. They assigned Paul Tasman, an executive at
13685-451: Was a 400% growth over 2012 when only 0.5% of trade titles were digital. In 2014, the growth was slower, and Brazil had 3.5% of its trade titles being sold as e-books. The Wischenbart Report 2015 estimates the e-book market share to be around 1%. Public domain books are those whose copyrights have expired, meaning they can be copied, edited, and sold freely without restrictions. Many of these books can be downloaded for free from websites like
13804-425: Was introduced in 1993. Unlike most other formats, PDF documents are generally tied to a particular dimension and layout, rather than adjusting dynamically to the current page, window, or another size. Different e-reader devices followed different formats, most of them accepting books in only one or a few formats, thereby fragmenting the e-book market even more. Due to the exclusiveness and limited readerships of e-books,
13923-598: Was launched in 2005. A review published of the project in Computers and the Humanities described it as "as innovative and fascinating a reference work as the technology that made it possible." In 1993, the project was described as the "second largest printed work of this century". The same review called it "excessive" and asked what its purpose was, going on to describe it as "the most pedantic work ever written". In 2020, The Economist described it as "the creation story of
14042-431: Was maintained by secular stationers guilds, which produced both religious and non-religious material. In India, bound manuscripts made of birch bark or palm leaf had existed since antiquity. The text in palm leaf manuscripts was inscribed with a knife pen on rectangular cut and cured palm leaf sheets; coloring was then applied to the surface and wiped off, leaving the ink in the incised grooves. Each sheet typically had
14161-503: Was to create a device which would decrease the number of books that her pupils carried to school. The final device was planned to include audio recordings, a magnifying glass, a calculator, and an electric light for night reading. Her device was never put into production but a prototype is on display at the National Museum of Science and Technology in A Coruña . Alternatively, some historians consider electronic books to have started in
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