(Source: technologybook, 2011)
Bloomberg Businessweek (2011) featured an article titled ‘How E-Books Are Coming Full Circle, Thanks to Tablets’ that discusses about e-books on the rise because of the tablet sales, especially Apple’s iPad. Rao (2003 cited in Lam et al. 2008) defined e-books as texts which are in digital form or any digital reading material, or a book that is in a computer file format, or even an electronic file of words and images.
When we think of the term ‘e-book’, the term ‘convenience’ will also come into mind.
Cavanaugh (2005) mentioned in his book that there are three main advantages of e-books:
Portability – We can bring our e-books everywhere with us, as long it is downloaded in a device, for example the iPad or any other tablets. Similar to what Lam et al. (2008) mentioned in their article, e-books are downloadable and also portable if they are stored in light portable devices.
Accessibility – Cavanaugh (2005 p. 5) explained that numerous online libraries and even bookstore distribute low cost, and sometimes even free e-books for users to download to devices. In today’s technology advanced world, the internet can be accessed almost everywhere. This also means that online libraries and bookstores can also be accessed almost anytime, anywhere which makes e-books downloadable anytime as well.
Usability – This is in fact one of the most important benefits of e-books to the society. As we all know, usability influences the success of a product. Therefore, the right usability must be present. Lam et al. (2008) justified in their article that many of the features and functions that are made available in e-book software has allowed users to learn and use it easily. Besides that, multimodality is also present in e-books features. Walsh (2006) described multimodal texts as texts that have more than one ‘mode’, which means information is communicated through several modes. For example, we are able to read e-books with the presence of sounds, images. As for using tablets to read e-books, we are able to touch the screen to scroll through pages. The technological difference, like screen, frames, hyperlinks, navigation bars, are designed to assist the reader’s learning, to attract and also to maintain interests of readers (Walsh 2006).
References:
- Cavanaugh, TW 2005, The digital reader: using e-books in K-12 education, International Society for Technology in Education, Washington, viewed 12 June 2011, <http://books.google.com.my/books?id=rIJIank876AC&source=gbs_navlinks_s>
- Lam, P Lam, SL Lam, J & McNaught, C 2008, Usability and usefulness of eBooks on PPCs: how students’ opinions vary over time, Centre for Learning Enhancement And Research (CLEAR), The Chinese University of
- Tofel, K 2011 How e-books are coming full circle, thanks to tablets, Bloomberg Bussinessweek, viewed 12 June 2011, <http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/mar2011/tc20110325_523054.htm?chan=rss_topStories_ssi_5>
- Walsh, M 2006, ‘The ‘textual shift’: Examining the reading process with print, visual and multimodal texts’, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy, Vol. 29, No. 1, pp. 24-37
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