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Originally Posted by sdive
Are e-books commercially available for PC consumption (excluding PDFs and apps)? I mean, could you talk about e-books for PCs before e-readers took off, apart from special interest books and classics/fiction? Again, what's coming thru is that the e-book market is mainly for dedicated readers or tablets, sometimes smartphones.
Thanks in advance.
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Yes, ebooks are available for PCs, both desktop and laptop.
There are a dozen or more reading applications for PC ranging from Kindle, Nook, and Adobe Digital reader that are tied to commercial ebookstores, to older apps like Mobipocket, Coolreader, etc.
People have been reading ebooks since the 1960's and 1970's; first on time-share systems, then on desktop PCs, later laptops. ebooks were one of the killer apps for the Palm Pilot connected organizer and later for PocketPC PDAs, from there the technology spread to smartphones and tablets.
As recently as 2010, there were more still people reading ebooks on laptops than on Kindles.
http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/forre...e-book-reader/
Broadly speaking, there have been four eras of ebook creation and reading:
- The mainframe era where it was strictly a hobby for IT personnel (since only they had the unfeterred access to the terminals need to read). This is when Project Gutenberg began. Hard-formatted txt files were the format of choice for ebooks. This sries of articlle covers some of the early efforts
http://www.teleread.com/paul-biba/th...-marie-lebert/
- The PC era brought ebooks to hobbyists and academics. It brought the beginning of the scan-and-ocr underground for commercial books. Flowing txt files and rtf were the preferred formats for ebooks. Distribution started on dial-up bulletin boards and over time moved to USEnet and later IRC.
- The mid-to-late 90's brought the PDA era and commercial ebooks for mobile devices. It saw the rise of eReader format from Peanut Press, Mobi format from Mobipocket, MsReader from Microsoft, and a variety of other specialized formats. It brought the first publisher-focused ebook format, OpenEbook, upon which Microsoft's format was based and which served as the basic for epub. This era brought a variety of LCD-based dedicated ebook reader devices to asia and the Rocket and Nuvomedia readers to North America and beyond. At this point ebooks reading spread beyond its techie roots to people simply interested in buying and reading ebooks but it remained a niche for hobbyists and enthusiasts. Around the year 2000, ebooks had attracted enough attention that their was a strong push to commercialize ebooks (for the early dedicated devices as well as PCs and PDAs. Microsoft was a strong proponent but the publishing industry was afraid off them and kept them at arm's length, preferring to deal with Adobe and its encrypted-PDF "ebook" approach. It did not succeeed. Teleread has a good overview of this latter period here:
http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/amazo...from-a-bullet/
- The failed ebook push of the early part of the century set the stage for the modern ebook era. Technically, this era began with the release of the failed Sony Librie in Japan and was followed by several other eink-based devices but those were still techie-and-hobbyist devices. The real breakthrough came from marketting: First, Amazon got their Kindle reader featured on the Oprah Winfrey show. Second, they implemented a promotional policy of pricing the top 40 or so NYT bestsellers for a flat $9.99, the first time new release ebooks were consistenly priced below hardcovers. Combined with the Kindle's built-in wireless connectivity (which meant Kindles were standalone devices that did not *need* PCs) drew in general consumers from outside the PC user sphere. Within three years books became a mainstream consumer product and its PC-based roots are apparently starting to be forgotten.
There likely is a fifth era yet to come when ebooks spread broadly beyond the narrative text commercial market to the academic and corporate markets and become the primary delivery vehicle for all kinds of books, not just recreational reading. But that will be a slower evolution.
But then, with arguably 50 years of history (the oldest known ebook dates to 1964), ebook developers are used to slow and steady developments.
http://www.teleread.com/ebooks/the-v...-think-it-was/