What is E-book?
An '''electronic book''' (also called an '''e-book''', '''ebook,''' or '''digital book''') is a book in digital form.<ref name=hiw>{{citation|title=Inside eBook readers|work=How it Works Book of Amazing Technology|year=2011|publisher=Imagine Publishing|page=150|isbn=978-1-908222-0-84}}</ref> E-books can be read on [[computer]]s or other electronic devices such as [[e-book reader]]s. E-book readers, such as the [[Amazon Kindle]], the Kobo eReader and the [[:en:Barnes_&_Noble_Nook|Barnes and Noble Nook]] are devices that are dedicated to showing e-books.<ref name=hiw /> ==History== The first e-book might have been the Index Thonisticus, a heavily annotated electronic index to the works of [[Thomas Aquinas]] made by Roberto Busa in the late 1940s. However, this is sometimes not called an ebook because the digital text was (at least at first) meant to develop an index and concordance, rather than as a published edition in its own right. Despite the extensive earlier history, it is commonly reported that the inventor of the e-book is [[Michael S. Hart]]. In 1971, Hart was given extensive computer time by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the [[University of Illinois]]. He created his first electronic document by typing the [[United States Declaration of Independence]] into a computer. One early e-book was the desktop prototype for a proposed notebook computer, the Dynabook, in the 1970s at the [[Palo Alto Research Center]]: a general-purpose portable personal computer capable of displaying books for reading. In 1992, [[Sony]] launched the Data Discman, an electronic book reader that could read e-books that were stored on CDs. One of the electronic publications that could be played on the Data Discman was called The Library of the Future. Early e-books were generally written for specialty areas and a limited audience, meant to be read only by small and devoted interest groups. The scope of the subject matter of these e-books included technical manuals for hardware, manufacturing techniques and other