Over the past decade a new concept of reading has evolved which is slowly causing the death of physical paper books, magazines and newspapers. It’s called an e book. “E” is for electronic version. Hence the name ebook.
It seems that gradually, ebooks are becoming the preferred choice over physical books. Reason being they are light weight, easy to store, easy to read and work well for the world by being an environmentally conscious way to save the trees.
The electronic material is available in various formats such as exe, html, pdf etc.The formats tell you what file type the book has been made in depending on which, what programs are required for it. Example : Files like htm are opened in Internet Explorer mostly.For opening a pdf file one needs one needs a program like the Adobe Reader. Other programs available are Microsoft reader (for LIT files), Flip Album Viewer for both Mac version as well as Windows version.
Specific devices for reading ebooks: Apart from the regular desktops and laptops there are devices which are available specifically for the downloading, browsing, surfing and reading of ebooks .Some of them are Kindle, Palm Pilot and Rocket ebook.
Creating an ebook
Once the material is written, it needs to be converted into specific file formats.Some of the popular file formats nowdays are : .epub, .mobi and pdf file formats. .epub is one of the more popular formats which however is vendor-independent but is not supported by EKindle.
.Mobi is known for it’s ability to include complicated content and high file compressions. This format is a popular choice amongst e book readers who want to make their notes or make freehand drawings while reading the content of the ebook.
Most common file format is PDF which can run on all platforms.It needs Adobe reader for pdf to open. There is an I book format from Apple. This is created using I books author on Apple. Ebooks created from this will therefore be sold only to Apple e bookstore.
There are plenty of softwares available today for creating an ebook from a word, .doc or .doc x file.
Ebook creator and Jutoh are some of the popular softwares. They import the doc files and let you work on them before converting them into .epub, .mobi or pdf files. Infact,I did some online tutorials to how Jutoh works.It was simple to execute if the instructions are followed as advised. The software is also available for windows/apple
Screen shots as follows of Jutoh available for Mac as i needed a Mac version (credit : http://www.jutoh.com/)
After downloading the software for mac, Jutoh lets you create ebooks either as a normal reflowable format or a fixed format.you can also write a full ebook in jutoh itself or import the content on jutoh to create one from an existing document.
I understood that the ebook could be created simply by importing the word file ,in either ms word,.docx or .doc file formats.since Jutoh ignores the page numbers and fonts , one just needs to import the text in the .doc/.docx/msword format., jutoh gives us the option of creating separator in the ebook content examples create chapters of the ebook. while creating a new project ,It is suggested to remove page breaks since the formatting of the document may not be perfect. You can also choose cover page designs by either going with Jutoh template or create a new one. While importing , the import coding is chosen as unicode 8Bit(UTF.8) the content Once all this is done, we just need to export the content.But in my trial I used the standard style sheet and format of jutoh. When all of this is done.We just need to select export from the file menue.Though may formats are possible, the .epub is most used.The file obtained in this .epub format can be read/browsed in an ebook reader.
Once content is converted to an ebook, these need to be launched. Some of the major players in the market which launch ebooks are Amazon, Apple, Kobo and Barnes and Noble. Just like for physical paper books, there are players who help launch them in the market, the same holds for e books too.
As per Forbes :
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeremygreenfield/2013/12/30/top-five-ebook-publishers-in-2013/
The 2013 end-of-year ranking of which publishers had the most success publishing ebooks in 2013:
- Penguin Random House — 478 best-sellers*
- Hachette — 258 best-sellers
- Self-published — 99 best-sellers
- HarperCollins — 91 best-sellers
I sincerely hope that this post helped you get an idea about ebooks and how they are created and distributed.
monamediamantras 