Monday, March 5, 2018

What is an eBook

An eBook is an electronic version of a printed book.The eBook is a any printed book in a digital form which may include text and images.  In today's era of digitization, eBook is the most crucial want of the day. With everything made available at the touch of your finger, traditional reading has been switched into an 'e-mode'; where we get to read any printed book as a eBook on a computer or a tablet, mobile phone or even best, e-reader.  Nowadays thousands and thousands of title could be read with eBook, that had once been printed on paper. Be it fiction, non-fiction, history, recipes, stories, study material, reference books or even classics - everything can be read with an eBook.





How is an eBook Produced?


To produce an eBook, usually one needs an existing published paper book or hard copies. Robotic book scanners are used to scan these paper books without damaging the original print edition. These robotic book scanners can scan book quickly and efficiently. These scanners help produce set of image files which can then be converted into text format by Optical Character Recognition Programme (OCR). This programme thus helps the mechanical or electronic conversion of these scanned images into a computer readable text. And thus forms an eBook which exactly looks exactly like book only in digital form.

Advantage of eBook over Paper Books


An eBook has a superiority over paper books. This is so because while printing paperbacks or hardcovers of a particular book, huge amount of paper needs to be produced, for which innumerable trees are cut down. It is said that to make just one ton of paper, over 24 trees need to be cut. Then in case, a book that is printed contain printing errors, the books are destroyed before reaching the shelves. That is a huge wastage of paper. Many printed books that do not make a good sale are usually destroyed or recycled. It also takes about seven gallons of water to produce one printed book, while it takes only two cups of water to produce a digital book. Hence not just trees but water is also wasted while producing paper books.

eBooks have a great advantage over the paper books, as

- eBooks save the transportation costs for shipping books.

- eBooks can help preserve books.

- eBooks help saving trees and thus avoid deforestation.

- eBooks are portable and can help one carry an entire library along with him.

- eBooks are much cheaper to produce as compared to paper books.

- eBooks offer free downloads of few books or if chargeable are much cheaper than the paperback or hardcover editions.

- eBooks promises convenient reading with its varied features such as change of fonts, in-built light, change of style, bookmarking, highlighting and more, thus offering a personalized reading experience.

- eBooks help in conversion of languages with such features made available.

- eBooks such as Kindle offer assistance with word-wise enabled features to understand meanings of words.

- With immense storage space, eBooks allows us to store as many books as possible.

- eBooks allows readers to rate a book and suggest other readers if the book is a good read.





Environmental Footprint of an eBook


Environmental footprint is the impact any activity or a product or a person has on the earth's environment system. This includes e-waste. As per research a paper book can create 7.5 kg of carbon dioxide whereas an iPad or Kindle can create nearly 130 kg 168 kg of carbon dioxide respectively. Once a Kindle is bought by a reader, he or she would start downloading as many books as possible in order to make up for the carbon dioxide during it's use. Use of electricity for charging the e-devices also needs to be taken under consideration. 

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