Ebooks
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Ebooks
Todd Fry, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Definitions and background
An e-book or e-textbook, sometimes referred to as an e-text (Pace, 2001), is a copy of a published, or soon to be published, book or text in a digital format with the intent to be read on screen or on a handheld electronic device (Annand, 2008; Buzzetto-More, Sweat-Guy, & Elobaid, 2007). E-books and e-textbooks fall into three categories: static e-books (pdf; epub), media e-books (web and mobile apps with audio and/or video), and interactive e-books (mainly mobile apps) (Roskos & Burstein, 2012).
E-books and e-textbooks originated in 1971 when Michael Hart started the Gutenberg Project, a plan to create a widely available source for books of all kinds in plain text format (Godwin-Jones, 2003). Since then, universities, such as the University of Virginia and Columbia University, have set up collections of texts to be accessed over the Internet and in the mid 1990s, the exponential growth of the Internet and the development of new software and devices for reading text, created media excitement around e-books and e-textbooks (Godwin-Jones, 2003). However, the excitement slowed until 2009 when e-book sales exceeded printed book sales (Hilton & Wiley, 2011).
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