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An Essay About eBooks
eBooks, or should we say eData in order to broaden the concept and coverage, are not as irrelevant as one
may probably would have been led to believe. As evidence that eBooks are already dead, everyone read that Stephen King abandoned (temporarily) his
The Plant eBooks project. But should a mystery have been an eBook in the first place?
As long as papers are for storing and delivering information; there are some features that can be improved. First of all, there is the absence of a search function. While reading material in a linear manner has its appeal, it can be difficult to find what one has read when one wants to refer to it later. Also, even though the content is not inherently physical, the delivery vehicle is, which means that unless one is in the exact physical location that has the book one wants, one cannot get at the content immediately.
There is also the issue of book length. Four hundred pages are the averaged lengths for a book, but in this post-literate society, many people are
put off by that length. Through the Internet, we have become accustomed
to the idea that everyone can find (for free) all the information one needs in short, readable column-length snippets.
Yet, for some reason, the eBooks that have gotten all the press have been books for which two of the three improvements
(searchability, accessibility and space saving) do not even apply. Fiction books rarely need to be searched, and fiction readers frequently want their books longer, not shorter. Certainly, there is no demand for only a chapter of a fiction book. The way that eBooks would perform the best against their predecessor is that one may need a portion of a technical book, a business manual, a home-improvement do-it-yourself guide, an article of
a newspapers, a picture in a library, a research paper, an automobile accident report, a medical file, an insurance policy, a definition in encyclopedia, a description of auto-parts, a street drawing of city planning
office... The list for
the need of eBooks and electronically archived data
(eData) can go on and on.
What is an eBook and/or eData?
Portable - Now one can have an entire digital library of books and magazines or company files within
one's laptop.
Convenient - Forget to pick up that new business book or the case papers to read on
one's trip? No problem. With eBooks one can download books or any other electronic documentation instantly anytime, anywhere!
Improvements - eBooks solve the searchability, instant accessibility, and length problems of paper books and any other physical documentation.
Easy to use - Turn the page or the file with the click of a button, set a bookmark, search for a specific phrase or word, including using the built-in search engine to do the job quickly.
Fun! - Just like printed materials - only better and it is the future.
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