E-Books Have Influenced The Development Of Education

E-Books Have Influenced The Development Of Education 

 Many factors have influenced the development of e-books: 

The advent of desktop publishing; the growing importance of paperless publishing; the ease with which electronic information can be created, updated, copied, shared, distributed and searched; the availability of local and global computer-based communication networks; and the beginning of the electronic information explosion. The concept of the e-book has evolved over time. E-books have changed in format, content and standards, and the process continues. In the 1960s, computers were used for ‘computerized photocomposition or typesetting,’ as it was then called. The main purpose of computers was to expedite print publication. 

 

In the 1970s computers began to be used to disseminate information, and electronic publishing took on a new shape. From that moment on, all aspects of publishing, from writing the text to final access by the reader, could be done electronically. The first e-books were mostly technical manuals and were intended to be read by small and devoted interest groups. But as early as 1971 Michael Hart had launched Project Gutenberg  with the vision of creating a digital library. Making digital books was a laborious and expensive task, and it took fifteen years for the project to reach the first 1,000 titles. 

The 1980s and 1990s brought big changes. Some companies began to produce e-books on CD-ROMs and floppy discs. The arrival of the Internet opened major new business opportunities. In 1999 net Library was launched with more than 2,000 e-books commercially available to libraries. Other companies soon followed, including ebrary, Librius, ZeroHour and Glassbook, but almost immediately they ran into fi nancial problems. The first websites selling e-books to individual members of the public, like eReader.com and eReads.com, were set up, and the first designated e-book readers were launched. Wilf Lancaster, in his 1995 article.

The evolution of electronic publishing, recognized  four phases in the 30-yearlong evolution of electronic publishing: 

(1) use of computers to generate print-on-paper publications;

(2) distribution of text in electronic form, where the electronic version is the exact equivalent of a paper version and may have been used to generate the paper version;

(3) distribution in electronic type solely, with the publication being very little over print on paper displayed electronically, with some ‘value added’ features;

(4) generation of completely new publications that exploit the true capabilities of electronics.

 According to Judy Luther, e-books are the third wave of electronic publishing:

First, indexes from secondary publishers became searchable databases via online information systems such as Dialog in the 1970s and then on CD-ROMs in 1980s. Second, when the web became popular, primary journals began converting to PDF format for local printing or to the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) format for enabling users to provide hot links to other references for further study.

Terje Hillesund argues that the evolution of e-book technology is not accidental, but related to the penetrating impact of networks and information technology on society. According to him, economic and social forces created and shaped the e-book technology. He claims that e-books are a social necessity because e-book technology meets the requirements of the network society.

 

What is an e-book?

But, before we go any further, it would be useful to define the term e-book. The terminology used for e-books is imprecise; they are often called e-books, or electronic books, but also digital books, and even online books. Even the spelling varies – e-book, ebook, e-Book, eBook. Changing concepts of monographs reflect our understandings of e-books. S.S. Rao points out that ‘the word e-book is often used simultaneously to describe content, format, reader software and reading devices’. In 2002, Armstrong, Edwards and Lonsdale defined the e-book as ‘any piece of electronic text regardless of size or composition (a digital object), but excluding journal publications, made available electronically (or optically) for any device (handheld or desk-bound) that includes a screen’.

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in their 2003 report define an e-book as ‘an online version of printed books, accessed via the Internet’.  In 2007, Dinkelman and Stacy-Bates in their article, Accessing e-books through academic library web sites, repeat the Armstrong, Edwards and Lonsdale definition. In her 2005 article E-books in academic libraries: an international overview, Lucy Tedd notes that, according to both the Oxford English Dictionary and Wikipedia the term e-book is used ambiguously for the text and for the device. 

She also cites a definition quoted by Tech Web, a business technology network:

Electronic books are handheld computerised devices with high-resolution screens, backlighting, and extendedlife batteries intended to serve as storage devices for literary works or things like technical manuals that can be digitally distributed easily over the Internet.

Since then, the definition has modified on Wikipedia and in August 2009, once I checked, it aforementioned that associate e-book (short for electronic book, additionally written eBook or ebook) is associate e-text that forms the digital media equivalent of a standard written book, usually protected with a digital rights management system. E-books are usually read on personal computers or smart phones, or on dedicated hardware devices known as e-book readers or e-book devices. Many mobile phones can also be used to read e-books.

The current definition in the Oxford English dictionaries varies. The Oxford Dictionary of English (2nd edition revised) defines an e-book as an electronic version of a printed book which can be read on a personal computer or hand-held device designed specifically for this purpose.

On the other hand, the Oxford English Dictionary Online has the following definition:

a hand-held electronic device on which the text of a book can be read. Also: a book whose text is available in an electronic format for reading on such a device or on a computer screen; (occas.) a book whose text is available only or primarily on the Internet.

Crestanietal  in their article, Appearance and functionality of electronic books, see the e-book as a result of integrating classical book structure, the familiar concept of a book, with features that can be provided within an electronic environment. Sarah Ann Long says that ‘e-book has become a convenient all-purpose term to describe a variety of reading experiences and methods for packaging and distributing digital content’.  In this book, the term e-book is used to cover any monographic text made available electronically, regardless of size and composition.

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