• You can search through the text for a specific word or phrase
• You can carry eBooks with you on your PDA or smartphone device
• You can shrink or enlarge the text size
• You can add digital bookmarks
• You get instantaneous delivery
• You help the environment by not using paper or requiring packaging

In 1971 Michael Hart was handed a real boon--$100,000.00 worth of computer time with a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer. He decided that the greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries. The first "e-book" was born--a copy of the Declaration of Independence. Those humble beginnings would become Project Gutenberg. Today Project Gutenberg houses 20,000 free texts and over 100,000 books are available through their partners. Over 3,000,000 books are downloaded each month.
E-books appeared on the web, easily shared and stored on a hard drive or storage disk, and quickly began to proliferate.
Early e-books were generally written in specialty areas, intended to be documents that only small groups might share, and therefore were few and far between. Their subject matter ranged from technical manuals for cutting-edge hardware and manufacturing techniques to material "not suited for minors", and everywhere in-between.
This fractured market of independents and specialty authors created a lack of consensus on the best way to package, sell, or read e-books.
Numerous e-book formats emerged and proliferated, some supported by major software companies, like Adobe's PDF format, and others supported by independent and open-source programmers. Multiple readers naturally followed multiple formats, most of them specializing in only one format, and thereby fragmenting the e-book market even more. The result was a lack of an overriding voice with the public regarding e-books, which kept e-books from becoming a mainstream product.
E-books continued to gain in their own underground markets. Many e-book publishers began distributing books that were in the public domain, or that were simply old and hard-to-find. At the same time, authors with books that were not accepted by their publisher began to strike out on their own, offering the books online so they could be seen by others. Unofficial, and occasionally unauthorized, catalogs of books became available over the web, and sites devoted to e-books began spreading the word to the public.
One of the first genres to become successful in the e-book field was that of the romance story. Romance novels were perfect for e-books, the genre already considered a "guilty pleasure" by most of the public, due to its oft-ridiculed and notoriously salacious content. E-book romances were easy to shop for and buy from the privacy of your home, and just as easy to read without revealing your guilty pleasure to others. Unbeknownst to the rest of the world, romance e-books had become a quiet success.
With all of this activity by major publishers and electronics companies alongside independents, new selling models are being developed, formats are beginning to homogenize, dedicated reading hardware is now available, and e-books are achieving global distribution. E-books have spawned new e-publishing houses, electronics manufacturers are releasing more e-book readers designed for the masses, and software designers are creating new reader applications for portable electronics gear like handheld computers, smartphones and game consoles. Sony has recently introduced a popular portable reader, and Amazon.com has begun selling its Kindle model.
The public, largely ignorant of e-books in the twentieth century, now see fellow commuters reading e-books on laptops around campus, on handheld computers at the coffee shop and on cellphones during their commute. In Japan, sales of mobile-phone novels—-books that you download and read, usually in instalments, on the screen of your cell phone—-have jumped from nothing five years ago to over ¥10 billion ($82m) a year today (The Economist)
Consumers can now find more of the kind of literature they want to read, from best-sellers by established authors, to cutting-edge material by daring new authors, and everything in-between.

Main article: Comparison of e-book formats
A writer or publisher has many options when it comes to choosing a file format for production. While the average end-user might arguably simply want to read books, every format has its proponents and champions, and debates over "which format is best" can become intense.

Text can be searched automatically, and cross-referenced using hyperlinks. This makes e-books an excellent choice of format for works that benefit from search and cross-reference capabilities, such as dictionaries, reference works, and certain kinds of textbooks.
Less physical space is required to store e-books. Hundreds (or thousands) may be carried together on one device. Approximately 500 average e-books can be stored on one CD (equivalent to several shelves of print books). Because they take up little space, e-books can be offered indefinitely, with no 'out of print' date, allowing authors to continue to earn royalties indefinitely (copyright law permitting) and allowing readers to find older works.
Readers who have difficulty reading print books can benefit from the adjustment of text size and font face. Text-to-speech software can be used to automatically convert e-books to audio books. In addition, some e-books devices allow reading in low light or even total darkness, with a back-lit device.
An ebook may be more comfortable for some to hold because it does not need to be held open like a paperback. It can also be set down and read hands-free.
It costs little to reproduce an e-book. Copies can be made instantly and in as great a quantity as desired. This makes it easy to retain backups and difficult to eliminate works once they have been distributed. From the publisher's point of view, the ease of distributing e-texts means that they can be used to stimulate higher sales of printed copies of books.[1]
With Internet access becoming ubiquitous in industrial nations, the ease of distributing e-books is a considerable advantage. E-books cost little to transfer, and such an operation occurs quickly. Readers can begin reading as soon as the download completes, or sooner, depending on the e-book formats' capabilities, without the need to visit a bookstore.
Although they require electricity to be read, the production of e-books does not consume the paper, ink, and other resources that are used to produce print books.
Books in electronic form are usually cheaper than same books on paper, and some are free.
An electronic book can be downloaded in seconds or minutes, while sending a paper book takes days or weeks.
Some books exist only in electronic form.
Ebooks can in theory be updated wiki-style, thus keeping a record of changes, as well as having the most up to date version.

An e-book requires an electronic device to display it. Many e-book formats require special software to display them, which may not be freely available or compatible with a reader's existing computing device. As an e-book is dependent on equipment to be read, it can be affected by faults in external hardware or software, such as hard disk drive failure.
All e-book devices require power.
There is always a concern that the book format will not be readable by future e-book devices.
Book reading devices are significantly more expensive than most paper books.
Book readers are more likely to be stolen than paper books.
Paper books are less fragile than book readers. You can sit on a book, jump on it, drop it from a height, and it still remains readable. However, the pages of paper books are subject to ripping. Both varieties of books suffer from potential liquid damage (eg. spills, submersion etc.)
If an e-book device is stolen, lost, or broken beyond repair, the replacement cost is often substantially more than that of a traditional book. In addition, all e-books stored on the device are lost along with it.
Anti-circumvention techniques may be used to restrict what the user may do with an e-book. For instance, it may not be possible to transfer ownership of an e-book to another person, though such a transaction is common with physical books. Some can phone home to track readers and reading habits, restrict printing, or arbitrarily modify reading material. This includes restricting the copying and distribution of works in the public domain through the use of "click-wrap" licensing, effectively limiting the rights of the public to freely distribute, sell or use texts in the public domain.
Unfortunately most e-book publishers do not warn their customers about the possible consequences of the Digital rights management scheme on their books. Generally they claim that Digital rights management is meant to prevent copying of the e-book. However in many cases it is also possible that Digital rights management will result in the complete denial of access by the purchaser to the e-book. With some formats of DRM, the e-book is tied to a specific computer or device. In these cases the DRM will usually let the purchaser move the book a limited number of times, after which they cannot use it on any additional devices. If the purchaser upgrades or replaces their devices, which they will do over time, eventually they will lose access to their purchase. Some forms of Digital rights management depend on the existence of online services to authenticate the purchasers. If the company that provides the service goes out of business or decides to stop providing the service, the purchaser will no longer be able to access the e-book.
With Digital rights management, it is more apt to consider the exchange of money for commodity to be a rental or lease rather than a purchase. The restricted book comes with a number of restrictions, and eventually access to the purchase can be removed by a number of different parties involved. These include the publisher of the book, the publisher of the DRM scheme, and the publisher of the reader software. These are all things that are significantly different from the realm of experiences anyone has had with a physical copy of the book.
Screen resolution is lower than paper, for instance the screen resolution of Amazon Kindle is 167 ppi versus 600-2400 ppi for a typical laser printer.
Some older e-book devices cannot be viewed in bright sunlight, but this problem does not exist for modern e-book devices, because they use e-ink technology.
From a publisher's point of view, e-books can in some cases be hacked, or disseminated without approval from the author or publisher. The ease with which an electronic document may be copied means that a single unprotected document may be used to replicate an unlimited number of perfect copies.

Some e-books are produced simultaneously with the production of a printed format, as described in electronic publishing, though in many instances they may not be put on sale until later. Often, e-books are produced from pre-existing hard-copy books, generally by document scanning, sometimes with the use of robotic book scanners, having the technology to quickly scan books without damaging the original print edition. Scanning a book produces an image file, which must then be converted into text format by an OCR program.[2] Occasionally, as in some e-text projects, a book may be produced by re-entering the text from a keyboard.
As a newer development, sometimes only the electronic version of a book is produced by the publisher. Usually, it is possible to convert electronic book to a printed book by print on demand.
E-book publishing as an industry is growing in the double digits yearly, according to the quarterly reports put out by IDPF. Among the first Internet-only publishers of new e-books were Boson Books, Hard Shell Word Factory and Online Originals, all founded in the mid-1990s. Each pioneered different aspects of what has since become common practice amongst e-book publishers, e.g. the support of multiple formats including PDFs, the payment of much higher royalty rates than conventional publishers, and the online presentation of free samples. Hard Shell Word Factory set the first professional standards for commercial e-books and pioneered author-friendly contracts. Online Originals was the first e-book publisher to win mainstream book reviews (in The Times) and a nomination for a major literary prize (the Booker Prize).
Since the late 1990s, the many newcomers to e-book publishing have included most major print publishers. At the same time, many established e-publishers started to offer print versions of some of their titles. Thus the line between the two is fast blurring.
There are some parts of the industry where there are particularly notable leading firms. In the general field of science-fiction and fantasy, Baen Books, an American publishing company established in 1983 by science fiction publishing industry long-timer Jim Baen (1943-2006) has a well-established position. It is a science fiction and fantasy publishing house that specializes in space opera/military science fiction and fantasy (though it does not restrict itself to these subgenres). It is notable for releasing books without DRM in a variety of formats, before hard-copy publication, and pre-releasing ebooks in parts before the hard-copy release. Many older titles are available for free, especially the first book in a series.
E-books have their own bestseller lists, including those compiled by IDPF, BooksOnBoard and Fictionwise. There are two yearly awards for excellence in e-books. The longest-standing and most inclusive of these is the EPPIE award, given by EPIC since 2000. The other is the Dream Realm Award, first awarded to speculative fiction e-books in 2002.

Copyright Protection
In order to be acceptable to authors, publishers, and booksellers, ebooks must have copyright protection that equals or exceeds that possessed by paper books. For traditional books, this means laws to prevent "piracy"--the printing and distribution of books by someone other than their copyright holder--and practical and/or technological barriers to reproduction on the part of consumers. The latter, in the case of paper books, is adequate: photocopying and binding a book is generally more trouble and often more expensive than purchasing another copy, and always less satisfactory.
Ebooks present a particular challenge in this regard because digital data lends itself so well to (unauthorized) copying. As software and music publishing firms know so well, the only solution to this problem is technological: the data, once purchased, must simply be impossible to copy in a useable format.
There is presently no standard means of protecting copyright for ebooks. Each manufacturer of ebook readers (e.g., NuvoMedia and SoftBook) and each electronic publisher (e.g., Fatbrain's Ematter) has come up with its own method of secure distribution and prevention of unauthorized copying.
There is, however, a serious attempt at an open standard in the works. EBX, or Electronic Book eXchange, is a system for applications and devices that uses public-key cryptography for copyright protection and distribution of ebooks. The EBX Working Group is spearheaded by a company called Glassbook; its members include individuals from Adobe Systems, Book Industry Study Group, Coalition for Networked Information, Compaq, HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Company, Hewlett Packard, Hitachi, Ingram Lightning Print, J-Stream, Microsoft, RSA Labs, SoftBook Press, Philips Electronics, and Xerox.
The latest draft of the specifications, which has a lucid and useful overview, is available here. For our purposes, the mention of a few features will suffice:

There are, in fact, a variety of schemes for securing copyrights of digital files. This technology has been in rapid development ever since the dawn of MP3. For example, both IBM and InterTrust have working technology (though it isn't designed specifically for the needs of books). Suffice it to say that the problems of protecting digital copyrights will diminish significantly in the next couple of years.

Readers & Main Formats Available from eBook Stores

Average Size of a Book

List of eBook Readers

Device Comparisons

Considering buying a dedicated eBook reader or a PDA? For more information or to purchase one, click on the images below.

Device	Example Image	eBook Format	Weight	Size	Screen
Franklin eBookMan		Mobipocket	6.5 oz.	5.17" x 3.39" x 0.67"	240 x 200 pixel LCD
Gemstar eBook		Gemstar eBook	17 oz.	largish	4.75" x 3" Monochrome Back lit Touch screen
Handheld PC		Palm Mobipocket	1.1 lbs	7.44" x 3.74" x 1.34"	6.5 in color LCD display 640 x 240 px on screen
Handspring Visor		Palm Mobipocket	5.4-6.9 oz.	smallish	about 3"x4", some color, some not
hiebook		hiebook	8.8 oz.	115.4 x 146 x 17 mm	Back lit 480 X 320 px touch screen LCD display
Palm		Palm Mobipocket	4-6 oz.	4.82" x 3.1" x .87"	Advanced LCD with backlight
Pocket PC		Microsoft Reader Mobipocket	6-16 oz.	Depends on device	Reflective or Transflective LCD, 16+ colors

System Requirements for your computer:

Device	Operating System	RAM	Disk Space	Connection
Franklin eBookMan	486 PC or higher Windows® NT 4.0, Windows® 98, or Windows® 2000	32 MB RAM (recommended)	50 MB	USB port
Gemstar eBook	n/a	n/a	n/a	USB port for PC connection, Infrared port (IrDA 1.0)
Handheld PC	Windows	n/a	n/a	One RS232C serial port, 115Kbps One IrDA port, 115Kbps One RJ11 modem port (hp jornada 720 only)
Handspring Visor	Windows 98, Me and 2000 OR Windows 95 and NT 4.0 with serial port (serial cradle sold separately) OR Macintosh System 8.5 or later	8 MB RAM minimum (16 MB recommended)	25 MB	USB cradle
hiebook	Windows	n/a	n/a	USB Cradle
Palm	PC with Windows 98, 2000 or Me, Macintosh with PowerPC processor and Mac OS 8.5.1 through Mac OS 9** ** Windows 95 and NT 4.0, or serial connectivity, require a serial HotSync cradle, sold separately.	5MB free RAM for Macintosh	30MB free hard disk space	USB Cradle
Pocket PC	Depends on device	Depends on device	Depends on device	USB Cradle

Reader Software by eBook Format

Adobe Digital Editions
	Download Adobe Reader and Adobe Digital Editions for your Windows PC or Mac.
Gemstar/Rocket eBook
	Our Gemstar/Rocket eBooks are designed for the RCA REB 1100. These eBook reading devices come with their own eBook reading software. If you'd like to read Gemstar eBooks on your Windows PC, you will need the Rocket eBook reader (2.73 MB).
hiebook
	hiebook devices come pre-installed with the hiebook Reader.
HTML
	Internet Explorer for your Windows PC, Windows Tablet, or Unix PC.
	Netscape Navigator for your Macintosh or Linux computer.
	Mobipocket Reader for your Windows PC or PDA.
Instant eBook
	Internet Explorer for your Windows PC, Windows Tablet, or Unix PC.
Microsoft Reader
	Download Microsoft Reader for your Windows PC, Windows Tablet, or Pocket PC.
Microsoft Word
	Microsoft Word is required to read Microsoft Word eBooks. For more information or to purchase Microsoft Word, visit Microsoft's website.
Mobipocket
	Download Mobipocket Reader for your Windows PC or PDA.
	Install the new version of the eBookManOS (which includes Mobipocket Reader) on your Franklin eBookMan to read Mobipocket eBooks.
Palm
	Download eReader for your Palm PDA, Pocket PC, Windows PC, or Mac.
Plain Text
	Notepad or WordPad or Microsoft Word or anything similar that's capable of reading .txt files.

eBook Stores

 

Frequently Asked Questions from eBookMall™

eBook Format-Specific FAQs
 

Main eBook Formats	Other eBook Formats
Adobe FAQs Microsoft Reader FAQs Mobipocket FAQs Palm FAQs	Gemstar eBook FAQs hiebook FAQs HTML eBook FAQs Instant eBook FAQs Microsoft Word FAQs Plain Text FAQs

Top FAQs
I didn't download my eBooks - how can I download them now?
I downloaded my eBook but now I can't find it.
I'm getting a file called ebx.etd instead of a .pdf file.
I accidentally ordered the wrong eBook format. Can I get my eBook in the correct format?
Are eBooks printable?
How do I get my eBook from my computer to my Palm/Pocket PC/eBookMan?

I have a _________. Which eBook format should I buy for it?
I have a Pocket PC. Which eBook format should I buy for it?
I have a Palm / Handspring. Which eBook format should I buy for it?
I have a Gemstar eBook / Rocket eBook. Which eBook format should I buy for it?
I have a Franklin eBookMan. Which eBook format should I buy for it?
I have a hiebook. Which eBook format should I buy for it?
I have a Macintosh. Which eBook format should I buy?
I have a computer running Linux / Unix. Which eBook format should I buy?

Ordering Questions
What is the general process for ordering eBooks?
When am I going to be able to download my eBook?
What's an Email Delivery eBook?
I accidentally ordered the wrong eBook format. Can I get my eBook in the correct format?
There are multiple "pending" charges on my statement.
Can I buy an eBook for someone else?
Do you have gift certificates?
I'm a teacher - can I order eBooks for my whole class to share?
Why is the same title in the same format listed more than once, at different prices?
Can you mail me a free catalogue?

Netscape Users
When I click on the link to download my eBook, all I get is a mess of weird characters.

Missing or Lost eBook Questions
I downloaded my eBook and now I can't find it.
I downloaded a Microsoft Reader eBook and it didn't give me a chance to specify a location. Where did it go?
I deleted my eBook. Can I get another one?
I ordered an eBook but haven't gotten it yet.
I bought an eBook but I didn't get it with my confirmation email. Where do I get it?
I accidentally closed my Invoice page and now I can't download my eBooks.

eBook Club Questions
What do I get when I join the eBook Club?
Is it necessary to join in order to purchase eBooks at eBookMall?
I didn't get my login information. Where do I get it?

Handheld Questions
Do your eBooks work on the Sony Reader?
I loaded my eBook onto my Palm but now I don't see it.
How do I get my eBook from my computer to my Pocket PC?
How do I get my eBook from my computer to my Palm / Handspring?
How do I get my eBook from my computer to my hiebook?
How do I get my eBook from my computer to my Gemstar eBook / Rocket eBook?
How do I get my eBook from my computer to my Franklin eBookMan?

Publishing Questions
I've written an eBook. Can I sell it at eBookMall?
How much does it cost to have my manuscript published as an eBook?
What do I need to have my manuscript published?
For all other publishing related questions, please see the Publishing Center FAQ.

eBookMall Policies Questions
How safe is it to shop at eBookMall?
Why do you need my email address? What are you going to do with it?
Can I return the eBook that I bought?
Can I pay with a check or money order?

eBook Format-Specific Help, Information, and FAQs

 

• Adobe eBooks (.pdf)
• Microsoft Reader eBook (.lit)
• Mobipocket eBook (.prc)
• Palm eBooks (.pdb)

Other eBook Formats

• Gemstar eBook (.rb)
• hiebook (.kml)
• HTML (.htm)
• Instant eBook (.exe)
• Microsoft Word eBook (.doc)
• Plain Text (.txt)