Hello everyone and first of all thank you for reading this first attempt at public writing, please feel free to rate or comment, or if you have any questions or requests feel free to contact me on my website. For my first article, I will be going over the basics of the e-book, what it is, when it began, how it works and what you can use them for.

An electronic book, or e-book as they are known, is a publication that is generally book-length, in a digital format. It is a book you can view on an electronic device; it can use text and images like you would see on a regular printed book, although some e-books can use interactive content as well. You read it on a device such as a computer, an e-reader, a mobile phone, a tablet and on certain MP3/4s. There are of course many, many devices you can use and I will be going through these later.

E-books are read in various formats, some are common, others less so, but they can all be used in e-books. Some of these are, text (.txt), hypertext (.htm, .html), Adobe Portable Document Format (.pdf). These are the most popular ones, although there are dozens more. Text (.txt) is plain text and is the most available format to use taking up about one byte each character (1000 bytes = 1KB) and it can be read on almost all systems. Hypertext (.html) is used in most web pages, so these e-books can be read on your internet browser. Adobe Portable Document Format (.pdf) is the general format of choice to view documents on the internet. It can be viewed on your browser, or saved to your computer and viewed as a document. Again these are only three formats, but these are the ones you’ll find in most e-books and they have been used for longer than some others.

There are many types of e-book, as many as there are books. There is fiction, with fantasy, sci-fi, romance, horror, adventure, mystery and so on, all available with the click of a finger, err...Mouse, to download to your expectant device. However what people are finding very useful nowadays is the non-fiction. From magazines to textbooks, resources are getting easier and easier to find on the internet, making the brick-laden student give a gasp of relief as their hundreds of textbooks are transformed into a single handheld device. Not to mention their 500 or so copies of the latest magazine.

Some people are wary of this incredible technology, preferring the $30 printed version of the $10 download bestseller, the waiting in line and lugging heavy bags, compared to a library you can put in your pocket. I hope that I have given you a bit of an idea as to what an e-book is, and just how useful they can be, so you can understand this isn’t something to avoid but to put to good use. An e-book is simply a book, disguised as a bit of digital data, and like all books, something that can be enjoyed over and over.

To find out more about e-books or to comment on this article or visit my website. (Follow the yellow brick links)