What is an eBook ?

The eBook or electronic book described books, magazines, newspapers, handbooks or all other publications which one can consult, distribute or preserve in the form of files numéric, the ebook. The majority of the great institutions and the companies have already adoped the numeric format and the whole of the book-related industries and of printed uses it all along a chain of production resting on the numerical one, of the newspaper offices to the digital presses.

The digital format suitable for the eBook is the shock proof, adapted to the climatic changes, can be recycled and ecological. Hundreds of thousands of works are already available in numerical format or eBook, their support adequate makes the book electronic really portable. The peripherals of reading of the numerical data largely improved and the advent of the flat-faced screens, attenuate ascribable tiredness, until very recently, with a reading supported on screen.

The electronic book or eBook, makes it possible to make available to the whole world an unlimited number of publications and at ridiculous cost by comparison so that it cost some for the distribution via the channels of diffusion of the printed book. A book of 500 pages digitized in format image and transposed to eBook format occupies hardly a few megabytes. The 36 000 pages large size of an encyclopaedia of the end of the XIXe century can be recorded on only one DVD (approximately 5 gigaoctects). The data storage becomes a secondary factor. The processes of digitalization or electronic publication reduce in a drastic way the diffusion and production costs of the book.

Textual research in data bases of books electronic is of such a envergue that it should revolutionize the work of the students and researchers. And why not a large universal library which will gather in eBook, all that was published on a particular subject, and this, in all the languages. One can expect that the developments during next years as regards automated translation make it possible to consider such a scenario.

As of the appearance of the micro-computer, one promised to us the advent of the paperless office, new technologies making obsolete this support which since the invention of the papyrus made possible the conservation of information and the transmission of the memory from generation to generation. Without the hundreds of thousands of papyruses collected by kings Lagides for the large library of Alexandria, one knows only one disabled person left the intellectual production of Antiquity. At the era of the cathode ray tube, one repeated us that our forests overexploited since too a long time could finally know a respite.

Paper made it possible to relay the documents designed and printed starting from the computer. The networks and the new tools of reading, revision and collaboratif work allow a medium-term reduction of the paper consumption by ensuring circulation, duplication and storage in quantity of information of all kinds. The phenomenon is observed already in the newspaper offices of several newspapers and magazine whose production is entirely carried out by numerical way, since the drafting of the texts until the "burning" of the matrices of impression at the printer.

Most of the eBook today in circulation are in pdf format. This format was created by the Adobe company.

To be able to read a eBook in pdf format, you need a small software called "Acrobat Reader" provides for free by Adobe.

Install it on your computer and you will reach thus the large numerical library which Internet constitutes.