Szegedi Tudományegyetem Klebelsberg Kuno Könyvtára
Having defined the concept of e-books in the previous lesson, this lesson provides a closer look at e-book software and hardware, while the next one discusses e-book-related services.
The following topics are covered:
When it comes to e-books, it is useful to be aware of certain technological issues related to how e-books are created and how they are read and used.
E-ink is a technology specifically developed for displaying e-books. It is based on millions of tiny microcapsules that contain positively charged white pigments and negatively charged black pigments, “floating” in a special transparent liquid. These white and black pigments become visible on the electronic paper depending on the electric charge applied.
As a display, electronic paper consumes electricity only when there is a change in the content that is displayed. This means that an e-book reader only uses electricity when a page is turned, and while the same page is being viewed (and there is no change in what is displayed), the screen consumes no energy at all.
One of the issues to consider is related to the complexities of turning analog books into e-books. The key to this is OCR or optical character recognition. Technically, OCR is the electronic conversion of a type-written, handwritten, or printed (analog) text with the help of a computer or similar device. Using a scanned document or even a photo of a document, a character recognition tool, containing elements of artificial intelligence, recognizes letters in the document based on their shape, and then it constructs words using those recognized letters. In the process, it may also apply necessary corrections by relying on dictionaries.
Most layered PDF documents that are widely used are created from analog documents using scanning and optical character recognition. All of this is associated with responsiveness, an issue that has already been discussed here. ‘Responsiveness’ is a technical term (similar in meaning to reactive, adaptive, flexible, etc.), and it is used in relation to documents, including websites and offline electronic documents, the content of which takes on a layout that adapts to the properties of the screen of the device on which they are used. This means that the layout of the given document is essentially flexible and transformable.
It is already clear from the above that there are fundamental differences between various e-book formats. These differences mainly stem from the factors that distinguish fixed-layout and dynamic-layout formats from each other. For this reason, it is simply not possible to name a single type of device that may be considered the best for reading e-books as such.
In the previous lesson, we talked about the basic differences between e-book formats, the fixed and dynamic page layouts. This is one of the reasons why it is not possible to pick one device as the best for reading e-books. Another is the purpose for which we are reading e-books and whether we need to use other programs at the same time.
Using a real e-book reader equipped with e-ink technology has significant advantages, especially if the device has a side light that illuminates the page.
1. Devices can run continuously for up to three to four weeks on a single charge.
2. The resolution on the screen is much finer, giving the documents a truly paper-like quality. In addition, reading documents on such devices is easier on the eyes than reading on a tablet.
You can use different reading software on different devices, depending on your personal choice.
If you want to borrow e-books from the SZTE Klebelsberg Library instead of reading them online, you can use Adobe Digital Editions. You can find out how to use it here.
There is a wide variety of both free and paid software tools that provide technical solutions for creating e-books. The first thing to consider when creating an e-book is whether the software which is used to write the text allows it to be saved in a format that is an e-book format itself, or whether the text can be saved in an output format that can be subsequently converted into an e-book.
Example
The open-source word processor LibreOffice can save files in the EPUB format. However, Apple Mac users do not have to worry either, as the word processor Pages, which comes pre-installed on their computers, is also capable of the same.
These software solutions allow people to avoid using XML-editors, which can do a very nice job, but can also be quite difficult to use for those who are used to “simple” word processors. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that there are some excellent XML-editors on the web, such as SIGIL editor, which is available for many operating systems.
If you want to create an e-book by converting a running text, it is usually easy to do this from one format, be it HTML, XML or Word. Instead, the real difficulties arise when the intention is to make an e-book from a PDF or any other format in which the layout of the document is fixed. Countless converters do offer this kind of conversion, and artificial intelligence has also improved a lot in this area. However, such conversions, will not work automatically and will not be flawless.
The best solution in terms of conversion is to start by having the PDF document processed with a good OCR software tool (e.g., Abbyy FineReader) to convert it into a text. However, this text then has to be manually edited and meticulously corrected, a time-consuming process that involves, among other things, comparison, proofreading and revision. All of this is followed by the editing of the document, which involves taking care of chapter headings, tables of contents, and title pages. The resulting document can then be converted to any of several formats using Calibre. In conclusion, the lesson here is that it takes a lot of work to turn a scanned PDF file into a fully functioning e-book.
Calibre is a solution for practically everything when it comes to dealing with e-books.
As a cross-platform, open-source e-book software package, Calibre is capable of the following:
With the increasing popularity of e-books, there is a growing demand for software that helps people create, edit, and manage high-quality e-books by themselves. This makes the high functionality provided by Calibre all the more valuable, especially in view of the fact that it makes it easy to do all of these things on a wide range of platforms (Windows, Mac, etc.).