How do you store a book in electronic form?
An e-book is really just a computer file full of words (and
sometimes images). In theory, you could make an e-book just by typing
information into a word processor. The file you save has all the
elements of an electronic book: you can read the information on a
computer, search it for keywords, or share it easily with someone else.
The first attempt to create a worldwide library of e-books was called
Project Gutenberg
and it's still running today. Long before the World Wide Web came
along, a bunch of dedicated Gutenberg volunteers took printed books and
scanned or typed them into their computers to make electronic files
they could share. For legal reasons, these books were (and still are) mostly classic
old volumes that had fallen out of copyright. The electronic versions
of these printed books are very basic, text-only computer files stored
in a format called ASCII (American Standard Code for
Information Interchange)—a way of representing letters, numbers, and
symbols with the numbers 0-255 that virtually every computer can
understand.
Photo: The Amazon Kindle electronic book reader (left) alongside a rival, the Sony eReader (right).
Photo by courtesy of John Blyberg, published on Flickr
under a Creative Commons License.
Note the picture displayed on the Kindle screen: E Ink screens can show pictures, though so far only in
very unimpressive black and white.
The problem with ASCII is that the text contains very little
formatting information: you can't distinguish headings from text,
there's only one basic font, and there's no bold or italics. That's why
people developed much more sophisticated electronic files like PDF
(Portable Document Format). The basic idea of PDF was to store an
almost exact replica of a printed document in an electronic file that
people could easily read on screens or print out, if they preferred.
The HTML files people use to create web pages are another kind
of electronic information. Every HTML page on a website is a bit like a
separate page in a book, but the links on web pages mean you can easily
hop around until you find exactly the information you want. The links
on websites give you powerfully interconnected information that is
often much quicker to use than a library of printed books.
The greatest strength of ASCII, PDF, and HTML files (you can read
them on any computer) is also their greatest weakness: who wants to sit
staring at a computer screen, reading thousands of words? Most screens
are much less sharp than the type in a printed book and it quickly
tires your eyes reading in this way. Even if you can store lots of
books on your computer, you can't really take it to bed with you or
read it on the beach or in the bath-tub! Now, there's nothing to stop
you downloading simple text files onto something like an iPod or a
cellphone and reading them, very slowly and painfully, from the small
LCD display—but it's not most people's idea of
curling up with a good book. What we really need is something with the
power of a computer, the portability of a cellphone,
and the friendliness and readability of a printed book. And that's
exactly where electronic book readers come in.
