Net Books - 15/04/2013

E-Book is basically a digital version of a book. They are becoming more and more popular each year. This is because technology is being developed all the time and it's becoming a big part of our lives. People don't buy as many books anymore, they prefer to buy digital versions on their e-books since they're much more practical and you can store thousands of books on one small, handy divice. However that's just one type of a net book. There are lots more in different formats which are used for different purposes.

Different types of E-Books:

Text file

A text file is the simplest type of e-book you can create. As the name suggests, it only allows you to have text in it, no videos, pictures or even hyperlinks. It takes up very little space and has been used for many years by companies and for all sorts of manuals however lately with the introduction of PDF files and Word documents, the simple text file lost many users. However because of it's simplicity, it is easily searchable, portable and editable on all sorts of systems and platforms.

Word e-book

This is a word processed document file which includes text, images, colours and links. It's clearly a lot more advanced then a normal text file however it's still relatively easy to use and looks a lot better than just a normal text file which might seem a bit boring since it only has text in it. It also allows you to use hyperlinks. The word e-book also resembles and an actualy piece of paper and because of all these advantages it's the most popular format used. It also runs on both Windows and Macintosh platforms. On the other hand it does take up more space especially when you insert images. It mainly used in places where multiple people working on the same project have the same Microsoft software, it lets you easily edit the document.

Adobe PDF e-books

Adobe released their portable document format (PDF) in 1993 and since then it has become one of the most popular e-book format on the market. It is now used by many companies for offical document and most instruction manuals. The majority of websites that allow you to download attachments like newspapers, magazines, reports or documents, use PDF for those files.

Website e-books

Website are a great type of e-books since they allows the biggest amount of multimedia like videos, images, links, animations and audio. They are however harder to store since they're made out of many files stored in a single folder rather than just a single file. A website size can get really big especially when the website gets more advanced and it could create a storage or running problems. It is also stored in an exe. file which could seem suspicius to some people or firewalls since exe. files can include viruses or trojans.

Reader e-book

Microsoft Reader was created to bring the user an ultimate real book experience. It gives the user the ability to bookmark pages for later reference, a search option, ability to make notes, make the software read out the book to you, and more a lot more extra features. It saves files in a XML format which isn't very popular and mostly specific to Reader. To make a Reader file, you first have to write out the content in a program like Microsoft Word, then convert to an XML file which the Reader supports. It's not as popular as Adobe but it does give you some extra features that adobe doesn't have.

Value of e-books

E-books are a great invention and lately they have become very popular. The main reason why they have so many users is because they allow you to put thousands of books onto one small device the size of a real book. Some might argue that they're too expensive however if you look at it in long term, it will pay back since the digital versions of books are a lot cheaper than actual books.