What is a Digital Book Reader
Digital book readers are gaining popularity all the time, with Amazon, the major online book retailer, especially keen to push the technology through their own brand of digital book reader. With the power of Amazon helping to drive it forward the number of digital book readers on the market is growing exponentially.
Despite this growth in popularity many people are unaware of what a digital book reader is, and how it can be used to enhance their own book reading experience. So let us look into the very fundamental thoughts behind this technology.
What is a Digital Book Reader?
A digital book reader is, in essence, a small mobile computer that is able to travel with you wherever you go. The very essence of it is the ability to travel easily, so they are lightweight and small – designed to be no more than book sized.
The technology is a natural progression from a hand-held PDA. PDAs are mobile computers designed to help you organise your day and also supported the reading of certain documents. Digital book readers have progressed that technology and taken the next logical step.
Rather than being an input machine the digital book reader is designed to be a display module (with some limited input capabilities), allowing different formats of files to be shown as text. These files can be saved to an internal hard drive or use external memory cards that are easily inserted.
These files, as the name suggests, are, in the main, digital books. Simply put they are the same text as normal books but presented in a digital format for a digital book reader to display on its screen (which takes up most of the front of the electronic device). Other files can be read, depending on the device, including reports in files such as .txt or .pdf, which have interested many commercial services outside of publishing.
A Difference
It is not simply a case of these devices being mini-computers that let you read books. Whilst that is an accurate description it is also a simplistic one. A lot of research and development has gone into these readers to ensure that the reading experience is a comfortable one.
It was discovered that using normal mobile technology to light and display text started hurting the eyes relatively quickly, making it uncomfortable and unlikely to catch on. This has lead to the development of such technologies as ‘electronic paper’ and ‘electronic ink’. These are designed to allow the readers to be read for long periods and still feel as natural and as easy to read as a book. The change in lighting also makes such devices easy to read in sunlight, which laptops have traditionally struggled in.
Electronic books, also known as ebooks, are available in a number of different formats. Originally the various hardware developers, such as Sony and Amazon, created proprietary formats so that ebooks bought for their hardware could not be used on other devices, effectively tying people and their ebook collections to the one hardware.
However as more hardware manufacturers have entered the market a general use format has emerged, ePUB. Sony has changed it’s recent offerings to include access to this format, as have most manufacturers (with Amazon the main notable exception).
Digital book readers continue to advance as technology changes and improves, but with the expansion of the books available, and the emergence of a standard publishing technology, it looks more and more like the digital book reader is going to be here to stay.
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