E-Books!!

An e-book (also: eBook, ebook) is an electronic (or digital) version of a book. The term is used ambiguously both to refer to either an individual work in a digital format, or a hardware device used to read books in digital format. Some users deprecate the second meaning in favor of the more precise "e-book device". However the term interplay works out colloquially in the long run, e-books are an emerging and rapidly changing technology, and since at least 2004 have included newer experimental online magazines, pioneered in part by Baen's Books in their release of the first Grantville Gazette.

The term e-text is often used synonymously with the term e-book, and is also used for the more limited case of data in ASCII text format excluding books in proprietary file formats.

 

An exception to this rule is the academic e-text, which commonly includes components such as facsimile images, apparatus criticus, and scholarly commentary on the work from one or more editors specially qualified to edit the author or work in question.

An e-book is commonly bundled by a publisher for distribution (as an e-book, an ezine, or an Internet newspaper), whereas e-text is distributed in plain text, or in the case of academic works, in the form of discrete media such as compact discs. Metadata relating to the text are sometimes included with etext (though it appears more frequently with e-book). Metadata commonly include details about author, title, publisher, and copyright date; less common are details regarding language, genre, relevant copyright conventions, etc.