Probably the worst naming decision ever made when it came to technology was to call documents displayed in an e-book reader an e-book. Such an unfortunate choice of names led many people not to know the real possibilities and just consider it a mere substitute for the paper format.
What is encrypted in the name
It never occurred to our ancestors to call the train carriage with a fixed route or the bicycle horse-pedal, because they were clear that they were completely different tools that required a different approach. But, thanks to the one who came up with the idea of putting book (book) in the name of the e-book, we must bear with the patience of a saint those who say that they prefer the traditional book to the electronic one because of the experience of touch and the smell of paper.
I am not objecting to the preference, just the comparison. It is something like saying that you prefer to ride in a row gondola than to do it in a supermarket gondola.
To be clearer. If I have to go from Buenos Aires to New York, I could go on horseback, but it is undoubtedly faster and more practical to do it by plane. Conversely, I can travel through the countryside by plane, but without a doubt I will enjoy it more on horseback.
How to read an e-book
The e-book can be read like a traditional book, from left to right and sequentially. But, where it reaches its full potential is in that material that requires an intense interaction with the reader. A novel or a book of poetry only needs the imagination of the person who reads them, and, without a doubt, the touch and the smell are part of the experience. Similarly, it occurs to me that if Christianity promoting groups distributed illuminated manuscripts, they would probably get more faithful than the cheap New Testament editions they distribute.
E-book formats, particularly the Epub format allow not only underlining and adding notes. They also give the possibility of accessing additional information using the Internet, using multimedia formats and sharing and discussing content with other users.
For example, if we are reading a book about Napoleon's military campaigns, we can follow up on Google Maps or find a thread on Reddit to express our opinion that the worst thing Spain could do was kick out José Bonaparte.
Some e-book formats
The first formats to share e-books were native to word processors; Shared material can still be found in .rtf or .doc. These brought limited interactivity such as the addition of internal links and the ability to copy and paste parts of the text into other documents. You could also underline and change the text and background color.
Being at the time OpenOffice a fairly limited office suite with respect to proprietary options, it had the surprising ability to convert .doc and rtf to Palm-compatible formats, a sort of predecessor of tablets that were little more than an electronic diary .
Today, from LibreOffice it can be converted to both PDF and Epub.
PDF (Portable Document Format) provides some more interactivity features. For now, has better cross-device compatibility than native word processor formats. Plus, you don't have to make document-to-document adjustments to your formatting preferences. You just have to configure them globally in the reader.
PDF readers on Linux have been noticeably improved (Particularly Okular) and allow underlining and adding notes. If you install a speech synthesizer they even read the text to you. The search tools are also better than the word processor. Other advantages of the PDF format is that it is much more convenient to view images and to do tasks such as rotating, rearranging or deleting pages and combining documents.
It was with the appearance of the Epub format, particularly its specification 3, that the electronic book reached its maturity. We can define it as a mixture of web page and .zip file. Not only does it allow greater interactivity thanks to the use of HTML 5 apis and CSS style sheets, it also allows the incorporation of multimedia files.
Given that my position is that the e-book finds its reason for being in interactivity, I did not stop at formats designed for a traditional reading experience (.cbr for comics and .fb2 for fiction) or in those that were left in disuse, such as. lit or .pdb.
As for .kfx and .azw they are proprietary formats of Amazon and in the next two articles we will see what we can do with them. I already warn you that it will not be pretty.