eBooks Explained


Written on 1/29/2016 at 12:09 pm by eBook-mom

E-books explained by eBook-mom

No longer are words just confined to a page.  Words are now made electric when they are presented in an e-book format. The e-book is all about what you can do with words.  With an e-book you have many advantages over the printed word because it is a presentation of words in a functional and serviceable electronic format.   Here are some things you can do with an e-book:

1.            Look up the definition by just tapping the word. 

2.            Alter the word by changing the font size and style. 

3.            Highlight a passage and make a note about it.

4.            Save the note for later review

There are dedicated devices called e-book readers that can access and store your e-books.  But, you don’t need a dedicated device to read your e-book as long as your device, like a smart phone or a tablet, can access the software or app to present an e-book to you.

What an e-book is not

You might be wondering if your Microsoft Word document or Adobe PDF file is considered an e-book.   After all, those words are electric and in some cases alterable.  They key difference is that Microsoft Word documents and PDF documents are meant for the printed word.  In these software programs, you keep track of words by page.   This means that the text does not flow.  If it’s on page one it stays on page one.  In an e-book, the text flows and does not have a page designation.

Why does text flow?

The reason text flows in an e-book is because of all the neat things you can do with an electric word.  Mainly, you can change the typeface or the size of the typeface.  For example, if you have middle age eyes and refuse to wear bi-focals like me, you would bump up the size of the typeface or font so that you could read the words easily.  However, bigger words are a game changer in a print book whereas in an e-book, the text would adjust and flow in the correct order. 

E-Books by the hundreds

Another great thing about e-books is that they don’t take up a lot of space.  For example, you can store hundreds of e-books on an e-reader that is meant for reading e-books.  My attention span is short: one minute I want to read a romance and the next minute I feel like a good memoir.  With an e-book reader, I can carry all sorts of books around that will suit my mood without breaking my back like a conventional stack of printed books would.

The cloud is where it’s at

Sometimes I don’t have an e-book reader in my purse and find myself with some time to read.  What do I do then?  Well, using an app like Amazon’s Kindle on my smartphone, I can access my e-book from a cloud.  The cloud is a place where you can store things and retrieve them using internet access.  This is great for those times that you come in on time for your doctor’s appointment and the doctor is running behind by an hour!  You didn’t expect to have time on your hands but now you do.  No problem, you have an e-book to read!

E-book versus print books

Some feel that it’s a battle:  e-book versus printed book.  I don’t believe it is.  I still read and buy printed books.  Yet, I’ve also embraced the electronic book but that doesn’t mean I am going to start replacing all my books with e-books. Do you think that the arrival of e-books is like the time that compact discs came on the market and people rushed to replace their records with compact discs?  In that case, the argument was that the sound was better on a CD than on a vinyl record.  Is the electric word better than the printed word?  What do you think?

Electric words rock

I’m pretty excited about e-books.  I believe that electronic words rock!  But for some people, this is too much change.  Yet, there are so many advantages to being able to access the electronic word via an e-book.  How do you feel about the printed word going electric?  Are the advantages worth the change?