The Rise of the eBook

From real books to eBooks

If you’re not familiar with the term eBook than you must have been on another planet or stranded on a desert island for some considerable time. eBooks seem to have taken the publishing world (is that even the right term now?) by storm. From the Amazon Kindle to the Apple iPad, the world of books and publishing has now changed beyond recognition.  Love’em or hate’m eBooks are here to stay.

EBooks aren’t really anything radically new, as the hypertext editing system and electronic documents have been in existence since the 1960’s but didn’t proliferate until the birth of the world wide web and then not in the form that we know now. Even electronic book readers have been around since 1998, but these early devices failed to capture the imagination on an unsuspecting public. It wasn’t until 2009 when Amazon released their first Kindle and the Sony e-reader emerged that eBooks seemed to provide a serious alternative to the paper varieties.