As Terje Hillesund says, information technology and especially the Internet have profoundly changed the ways of publishing. Newspapers, magazines and periodicals have for years been published online and all kinds of texts are now available in digitised form. In the words of the Wikipedia, an e-book is the digital media equivalent of a conventional printed book. Such documents are either read on personal computers, or on dedicated hardware devices known as e-book readers or e-book devices.
Advantages
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Text can be searched automatically, and cross-referenced using hyperlinks. This makes e-books an excellent choice of format for works that benefit from search and cross-reference capabilities, such as dictionaries, reference works, and certain kinds of textbooks.
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Readers who have difficulty reading print books can benefit from the adjustment of text size and font face. Text-to-speech software can be used to automatically convert e-books to audio books. can also be set down and read hands-free.
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It costs little to reproduce an e-book. Copies can be made instantly and in as great a quantity as desired. This makes it easy to retain backups and difficult to eliminate works once they have been distributed.
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With Internet access becoming ubiquitous in industrial nations, the ease of distributing e-books is a considerable advantage. E-books cost little to transfer, and such an operation occurs quickly. Errors can be easily and quickly corrected in an e-text.
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Although they require electricity to be read, the production of e-books does not consume the paper, ink, and other resources that are used to produce print books.
Disadvantages
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An e-book requires an electronic device to display it. Many e-book formats require special software to display them, which may not be freely available or compatible with a reader’s existing computing device.
- Digital rights management techniques may be used to restrict what the user may do with an e-book. For instance, it may not be possible to transfer ownership of an e-book to another person, though such a transaction is common with physical books. Some can phone home to track readers and reading habits, or restrict printing.
- Unfortunately most e-book publishers do not warn their customers about the possible consequences of the Digital rights management scheme on their books. Generally they do discuss the fact that Digital rights management is meant to prevent copying of the e-book.
- With Digital rights management, it is more apt to consider the exchange of money for commodity to be a rental or lease rather than a purchase. The restricted book comes with a number of restrictions, and eventually access to the purchase can be removed by a number of different parties involved.
- These include the publisher of the book, the publisher of the DRM scheme, and the publisher of the reader software. These are all things that are significantly different from the realm of experiences anyone has had with a physical copy of the book.
Computers and networks have changed society and our way of thinking and living. During the last quarter of the last century a new information and network society evolved. The development of e-books is part of this history, in turn changing the whole book industry.To sum up, and from my point of view, e-boosk are a great and modern tecnich which will undoubtedly help us.
