E-Books

At the present generation e-books are quite famous amongst the people. But they haven’t become that very popular, in the future generation ,probably e-books will be the most common ways of reading!!
Literally e books mean electronic books, electronic equivalent of a conventional printed book. The term has been used ambiguously to refer to either an individual work in a digital format, or a hardware device used to read books in digital format, more specifically called an e-book device or e-book reader. E-books are an emerging and rapidly changing technology, that can branch to include other formats, such as online magazines, such as the Grantville Gazette, published by Baen's Books.
E-Books are generally read on computers and other devices specially designed like the electronic page. This is the most modern form of reading books
The term e-text is a broader term than e-book, and is also used for the particular case of data in ASCII text format, rather than books in proprietary file formats. It also includes the academic e-text, which commonly contains 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 on the Web, 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, relevant copyright conventions, etc.

Audio Books
An audio book is a recording of the contents of a book read aloud.
                                           
Audio Books are usually distributed on CDs, cassette tapes, or digital formats (e.g., MP3 and Windows Media Audio). The term "audio book" has been synonymous with "books on tape" for roughly twenty years. For the year 2005, Cassette-tape sales made up roughly 16% of the audio book market, with CDs sales making up for 74%.(statistics courtesy:www.wikipedia.org)Downloadable audio books accounted for approximately 9% of the market.
Audio books also come as fully dramatized versions of the printed book, sometimes calling upon a complete cast, music, and sound effects. Each spring, the Audie Awards are given to the top nominees for performance and production in several genre categories.
Now comparing the past and the coming future,there is a similarity. The journey started with reading aloud and now centuries later it has come back to audio books!!

pictures courtesy: www.pbskids.org, www.audiobookforfree.com

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