What is EBook?

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The main reasons for people buying e-books online are possibly lower prices

It is the content that matters, not the format – while reading on e-ink readers, tablets and smartphones

Despite their increasing popularity, there are still several misconceptions about ebooks worldwide.

This article aims to provide a beginner’s guide to those who still believe that the smell of ink

This should be straightforward to answer, you would think.

At first glance, we could say that an ebook is a book read on an electronic device

But this description is somewhat vague and wide, including many things that are not an ebook.

Therefore it is better to approach this question from the perspective of what is a difference

between an epub, a word document and a PDF file.

While you can (and do) read your friend’s dissertation or your neighbor’s recipe book on your smartphone, it doesn’t count as an ebook as long as you can change the text.

Ebooks made for public distribution are in a format that is not easy to change (ideally impossible) without the author’s permission

All ebook reading apps are designed to restrict any kind of editing while leaving open the possibility of adding notes and highlighting (without changing the original file).

While PDFs are literally impossible to edit, they still don’t qualify as ebooks

if you have ever tried reading a PDF on a tiny screen, you perfectly know.

You can’t change the layout

reading a PDF on an e-reader device is almost as uncomfortable as photographing a whole book and reading

which is something none of us would ever do, obviously.

PDF is the ideal format for print: it is designed with the exact paper size in mind.

It always looks like the print version. Never changes.

books, on the other hand, are created in a format that changes shape according to the device you read it on.

You will still have chapters and paragraphs, but the line breaks aren’t forced.

it will always perfectly fill your screen. You expect websites change their layouts when you are looking at them from your tablet or phone; the same goes for epubs.

The epub 3 standard, however, introduced fixed-layout epubs

everything on the screen has an absolute position.