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I mean, if you put all the text from a book into a txt file, how is it not an ebook? Does being an "ebook" come from being a digital representation of a book, o
by m12k 5y ago
I mean, if you put all the text from a book into a txt file, how is it not an ebook? Does being an "ebook" come from being a digital representation of a book, or is it a reserved title for something in a specific file format created for the purpose such as .epub or .mobi? As far as I know ebook just means electronic book, and a txt file can check both those boxes if it has the right content.
- bambax 5y agoI answered below, but my point is it's hard to conceptualize an "ebook" without an ebook reader. (Of course the technical format is irrelevant.)
- jhbadger 5y agoBut there are lots of things you can do with an ebook besides read it. One thing that started earlier than people might think is "digital humanities"; that is literary analysis by computer. You could do things like look at word usage in a text by an unknown author and compare it to word usages by known authors and try to identify the author. Or you could compare versions of a text and basically make an evolutionary tree of changes and use this to infer what the original version was like. Of course people had been doing these things by hand, but having computer readable ebooks made it possible to write programs to do them.