September 22, 2002

The Library of Congress, which is the national library of America, reported the other day that it has received its first delivery of electronic books for electronic copyright registration and deposit. Titles were transmitted over the Internet and processed in digital format entirely. This event signals the advent of a new publishing age, namely that of battery-powered books.

Books have undergone a tremendous transition since their birth as papyrus editions produced by the ancient Egyptians in 2700 BC. The Babylonians wrote their books on clay-tablets on which imprints were made before being baked. Before the invention of paper by the Chinese the parchment (specially treated animal skin) replaced papyrus. The Diamond sutra, the first known printed book, was first produced by the Chinese in 868 AD. The printing machine made possible the mass production of books, as we know them today.

As the demand for books grew, preservation and storage became the most important aspect of the book business. The invention of microfilm and microfiche resolved the space problem to a great extent. A 3x5 inch sheet of the microfiche can easily accommodate a complete issue of Newsweek or Time magazine.

What is an electronic book? Generally called “e-book”, it is essentially textual and graphic data in a digital format. It may be a replica of our traditional book or it may be text that is prepared specifically for the e-book format.

An e-book is available in various formats. The most popular are Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader (formerly Glass Book Format); Gemstar eBook, and Microsoft Reader. Based on Portable Document Format (PDF), Adobe provides a high quality display. It has presently over 30 million installed users. The Gemstar eBook and the Microsoft Reader are based on the HTML format, in which the page serves more like a container. The page is not tied to specific text or graphics. For the time being, all e-book Reader software are provided to users free of charge.

All a reader needs to read an e-book is a PC and a connection to the Internet. The reader will need to download any of the three sofwares named above. Most people prefer the Adobe.

Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), that is a pocket PC, could also be used for downloading and reading digital text, in addition to its data recording function. There are approximately 12 million PDAs in circulation at present.

Reading an e-book causes no strain on the eyes. e-book Readers have made significant progress in the area of on-screen reading. Adobe format lets us sharpen the text and the Gemstar e-book has a backlight that makes it easy to read in the dark.

There was a spate of e-book publishing and selling in the summer of 2000, when two major publishers of New York, Random House and Simon & Schuster, announced that they would offer free of charge their most popular science-fiction titles for instant download in the Microsoft Reader format for the new pocket PC from barnsandnoble.com/. the website of Barnes & Noble Inc, the largest bookstore chain of America.

To promote electronic reading, the infant medium of e-publishing is taking advantage of the best selling authors such as Michael Crichton, a popular science-fiction writer, and Stephen King, another famous fiction writer. Books selected for this purpose included the best-seller Timeline by Michael Crichton and Stephen King’s Riding the bullet, a ghost story offered solely as an e-book, along with 15 books from the famous “Star Trek” series of Simon & Schuster.

The free download was initially available from the online outlet of Barnes & Noble Inc. Over 500,000 readers went online to download the book Riding the bullet. This fact proves that e-book reading has become popular in case of popular fiction like romance and science fiction, as well as obscure literary stories.

The day doesn’t seem to be too far away when more and more books will be read on handheld computers. e-books are in rapid online publishing these days. They can be purchased easily, instantly, carried with one’s laptop or Palm PC. Eventually they will be as common as paper books. The accessibility of PDAs will usher in the e-book era just as 60 years ago the paperbacks revolutionized the publishing industry in America and Europe.

Over 3,000 Xlibris titles have been converted to the Glassbook Format. One e-book is available at $8 through the Xlibris Website bookstore. Xlibris is an e-book publisher, which was launched in 1997 with headquarters in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Xlibris has helped publish over 4,000 titles.

Major publishers such as Harper Collins and Time Warner Trade Publishing have created separate e-book departments. Time Warner, another leading New York publisher, which has published many bestselling authors, such as Anita Shreve, David B. Brown, James Patterson, Nelson DeMille, Nicolas Sparks, Robert Kiyosaki, launched iPublish.com in the year 2000.

It scouts for new talents for both digital online and print distributions. It provides new authors with the full services of a professional publisher at no charge. iPublish.com has been producing each month between 25 and 50 e-books since September 2000. iPublish.com’s iWrite offers online writing courses. These aim at creating an online community of writers who are required to critique and rate work(s) of each other. The site offers e-books in four formats: Adobe, Gemstar, Palm Reader and MS Reader.

Simon and Schuster launched an e-bookstore on SimonSaysShop.com enabling customers to download hundreds of e-books that they have produced. The Publisher offers at $5 each a group of titles, which include a number of Stephen King’s e-books and Buffy the vampire slayer #1: prophecies at $1. The original e-books that Simon & Schuster produced first are Cage of love and Little psychic by V.C. Andrews, plus the Magic of Tribbles and Triangle by Jeffrey Deaver. These titles were offered free to customers.

The Great Unpublished (www.greatunpublished.com/), launched in May 2000, is a digital conversion/POD (Prince of Darkness; Diablo 630) service and an online bookstore, located at Charleston, South Carolina. It converts books into POD titles. It offers customers the PDF e-book version of the same book for free. As of August 2001, it had reportedly sold 4,000 e-books each month in various genres.

Small epublishing services continue to enter the budding e-book market. Publishing online (www.publishingonline.com/.) is an online retailer, which offers a variety of fiction and nonfiction titles in the PDF format. It provides over 3,000 titles from about 100 publishers and downloadable music in the MP3 format. Titles are available on Adobe. All of its e-books are installed with Adobe PDF Merchant DRM application, that blocks e-books from being copied or transferred by email. Customers who open an account can download titles of their choice to as many as three computers.

Educational e-book publishing has also made its debut. The Princeton University Press at New Jersey has launched its e-book publishing programme called Digital Books Plus (DBP). The Press envisages the publication of over 500 backlist titles as e-books and, also, plans to publish 10 to 12 titles every year. Its e-books are available in all the major e-book formats. The books released through DBP have their own websites. The first title of the DBP series, Republic.com by Cass Sunstein was released in March 2001. This e-book sheds light on the nature of a democratic society. In June 2001, the Princeton Press released Breaking the deadlock by Richard A. Posner, which deals with the controversy over the US elections of 2000.

Several college textbook publishers in the United States have taken up e-book publishing, particularly in the area of engineering and technology. For instance, John Wiley has published quite a few e-books for the higher education market. McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Thomson have converted some of their reference works and textbooks into e-books.

Libraries have also taken an initiative in offering e-books to their clientele. The netLibrary is generally known here as the world’s premier provider of e-books. Founded in August 1998, it is located in Boulder, Colorado. It functions as a division of the Online Computer Library Centre (OCLC), which is a non-profit organization. OCLC offers computer-based cataloguing, reference, resource sharing and preservation service to libraries of the world.

The netLibrary helps academic, corporate, and public libraries develop a rich learning environment for their users. Its catalogue contains now over 40,000 e-books in subjects such as arts, business, history, literature, religion, science, sociology and technology. It builds up archives, and hosts and maintains e-book collections.

Hundreds of US and world libraries are presently providing netLibrary’s e-books to their clientele. Library users can search, borrow, read and return e-books through the Internet. Users can also easily access library resources anywhere, anytime, and perform full-text searches across thousands of titles or within a particular book to augment research and reference projects. A person can view e-books online from any location through the use of an Internet browser.

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