FAQs
Out-of-Print
An out-of-print book is a book that is no longer being published. Out-of-print books are often rare, and may be difficult to acquire.
What is the public domain?
The public domain is generally defined as consisting of works that are either ineligible for copyright protection or with expired copyrights. No permission whatsoever is needed to copy or use public domain works. Public domain works and information represent some of the most critical information that faculty members and students rely upon. Public domain works can serve as the foundation for new creative works and can be quoted extensively. They can also be copied and distributed to classes or digitized and placed on course Web pages without permission or paying royalties.
What types of works make up the public domain?
Categories of material that are generally not eligible for federal copyright protection include:
• Ideas and facts
• Works with expired copyrights
• Works governed by early copyright statutes that failed to meet the requirements for copyright protection, i.e., notice, registration, and renewal requirements (see the Rules of thumb, below, for details)
• U.S. government works (projects written by non-government authors with federal funding may be copyright protected
• Scientific principles, theorems, mathematical formulae, laws of nature
• Scientific and other research methodologies, statistical techniques and educational processes
• Laws, regulations, judicial opinions, government documents and legislative reports
• Words, names, numbers, symbols, signs, rules of grammar and diction, and punctuation
How can I tell if copyright has been renewed?
Copyright renewals only concern those works that were first published in the U.S. during the years 1924-1963. Works published during this period had to get their copyrights renewed at the U.S. Copyright Office in their 28th year in order to stay copyrighted. There is no need to research renewals prior to 1923 as these are in the public domain, or after 1963 as these received automatic renewal for a 95-year copyright term. To find out whether a particular work was renewed usually requires a search of records in the U.S.Copyright Office. For more information on this process, see U.S. Copyright Office: Circular 15: Renewal of Copyright. For works registered or renewed since 1978, search the U.S. Copyright Office online search site. Alternatively, a researcher can arrange for the U.S. Copyright Office to conduct a search of the copyright records for $75.00 per hour by submitting a Search Request Form. For more information about the U.S. Copyright Office search service, see U.S. Copyright Office: Circular 22: How to Investigate the Copyright Status of a Work. Additional options include writing a letter directly to the author or publisher verifying that there was no renewal, or purchasing search services from a commercial agency.
The Kindle
The Amazon Kindle is an e-book reader developed by Amazon.com subsidiary Lab126 which uses wireless connectivity to enable users to shop for, download, browse, and read e-books, newspapers, magazines, blogs, and other digital media.
ebook (Electronic book)
An electronic book (also e-book, ebook, electronic book, digital book) is a book-length publication in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, and produced on, published through, and readable on computers or other electronic devices.[1] Sometimes the equivalent of a conventional printed book, e-books can also be born digital. The Oxford Dictionary of English defines the e-book as "an electronic version of a printed book,"[2] but e-books can and do exist without any printed equivalent. E-books are usually read on dedicated hardware devices known as e-Readers or e-book devices. Personal computers and some mobile phones can also be used to read e-books.
The Nook
The Barnes & Noble Nook (styled "nook") is a brand of electronic-book reader developed by American book retailer Barnes & Noble,[1] based on the Android platform.
The Kobo
The Kobo eReader is an e-book reader produced by Toronto-based company Kobo Inc.
Digital media
Digital media is a form of electronic media where data is stored in digital (as opposed to analog) form. It can refer to the technical aspect of storage and transmission (e.g. hard disk drives or computer networking) of information or to the "end product", such as digital video, augmented reality or digital art.
e-book formats
Comic Book Archive file
Format: compressed images
Published as: .cbr (RAR); .cbz (ZIP); .cb7 (7z); .cbt (TAR); .cba (ACE)
A Comic Book Archive file or ComicBook Reader File consists of a series of image files, typically PNG (lossless compression) or JPEG (lossy compression) files, stored as a single archive file, for the purpose of sequential viewing of images, especially comic books. The idea was made popular by the CDisplay image viewer; since then, many viewers for different platforms have been created. Comic Book Archive files are not a distinct file format; only the file name extension differs from a standard file of the given archive type. Some applications support additional tag information (like artists or story information) in the form of embedded XML files in the archive, or use of the Zip comment function.
EPUB
Main article: EPUB
Format: IDPF/EPUB
Published as: .epub
The EPUB logo.
The .epub or OEBPS format is an open standard for e-books created by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). It combines three IDPF open standards:
• Open Publication Structure (OPS) 2.0, which describes the content markup (either XHTML or Daisy DTBook)
• Open Packaging Format (OPF) 2.0, which describes the structure of an .epub in XML
• OEBPS Container Format (OCF) 1.0, which bundles files together (as a renamed ZIP file)
The EPUB format is rapidly gaining popularity and as of 2011 is the most widely supported vendor-independent XML-based e-book format. The format can be read at least by the Kobo eReader, Apple's iBooks app running on iOS devices such as the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, Barnes and Noble Nook, Sony Reader, BeBook, Bookeen Cybook Gen3 (with firmware v. 2 and up), COOL-ER, Adobe Digital Editions, Lexcycle Stanza, BookGlutton, AZARDI, FBReader, Aldiko, Moon+ Reader and WordPlayer on Android, Freda on Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7, and the Mozilla Firefox add-on EPUBReader. Several other desktop reader software programs are currently implementing support for the format, such as dotReader, FBReader, Mobipocket, uBook and Okular.
The only notable device lacking integrated support for the EPUB format is the Amazon Kindle, although there has recently been speculation that the Kindle will soon support this format.[4]
Adobe Digital Editions uses .epub format for its e-books, with DRM protection provided through their proprietary ADEPT mechanism. The recently developed ADEPT framework and scripts have been reverse-engineered to circumvent this DRM system.[5]
eReader
Formerly Palm Digital Media/Peanut Press
Format:
Palm Media
Published as:
.pdb
eReader is a freeware program for viewing Palm Digital Media electronic books which use the pdb format used by many Palm applications. Versions are available for iPhone, PalmOS, WebOS, Android, Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile Pocket PC/Smartphone, desktop Windows, and Macintosh. The reader shows text one page at a time, as paper books do. eReader supports embedded hyperlinks and images. Additionally, the Stanza application for the iPhone and iPod Touch can read both encrypted and unencrypted eReader files.
The program supports features like bookmarks and footnotes, enabling the user to mark any page with a bookmark, and any part of the text with a footnote-like commentary. Footnotes can later be exported as a Memo document.
The company also offers two Windows/MacOS programs for producing e-books: the Dropbook, which is free, and the eBook Studio, which is not. Dropbook is a file-oriented PML-to-PDB converter; eBook Studio incorporates a WYSIWYG editor. Both programs are compatible with simple text files.
On July 20, 2009, Barnes & Noble announced[6] that the eReader format will be the method they will use to deliver e-books. Their Nook Reader supports the eReader format,[7] but it is not currently supported on Barnes & Noble's NookColor. eReader format is also supported by the discontinued eSlick, an e-reading device from Foxit Software.
Hypertext Markup Language
Format:
Hypertext
Published as:
.htm; .html
HTML is the markup language used for most web pages. E-books using HTML can be read using a Web browser. The specifications for the format are available without charge from the W3C.
HTML adds specially marked meta-elements to otherwise plain text encoded using character sets like ASCII or UTF-8. As such, suitably formatted files can be, and sometimes are, generated by hand using a plain text editor or programmer's editor. Many HTML generator applications exist to ease this process and often require less intricate knowledge of the format details involved.
HTML on its own is not a particularly efficient format to store information in, requiring more storage space for a given work than many other formats. However, several e-Book formats including the Amazon Kindle, Open eBook, Compressed HM, Mobipocket and EPUB store each book chapter in HTML format, then use ZIP compression to compress the HTML data, images, metadata and style sheets into a single, significantly smaller, file.
HTML files encompass a wide range of standards[9] and displaying HTML files correctly can be complicated. Additionally many of the features supported, such as forms, are not relevant to e-books.
Mobipocket
Format:
Mobipocket
Published as:
.prc; .mobi
The Mobipocket e-book format is based on the Open eBook standard using XHTML and can include JavaScript and frames. It also supports native SQL queries to be used with embedded databases. There is a corresponding e-book reader. A free e-book of the German Wikipedia has been published in Mobipocket format.[10]
The Mobipocket Reader has a home page library. Readers can add blank pages in any part of a book and add free-hand drawings. Annotations — highlights, bookmarks, corrections, notes, and drawings — can be applied, organized, and recalled from a single location. Images are converted to GIF format and have a maximum size of 64K,[11] sufficient for mobile phones with small screens, but rather restrictive for newer gadgets. Mobipocket Reader has electronic bookmarks, and a built-in dictionary.
The reader has a full screen mode for reading and support for many PDAs, Communicators, and Smartphones. Mobipocket products support most Windows, Symbian, BlackBerry and Palm operating systems, but not the Android platform. Using WINE, the reader works under Linux or Mac OS X. Third-party applications like Okular and FBReader can also be used under Linux or Mac OS X, but they work only with unencrypted files.
The Amazon Kindle's AZW format is basically just the Mobipocket format with a slightly different serial number scheme (it uses an asterisk instead of a Dollar sign), and .prc publications can be read directly on the Kindle. The Kindle AZW format also lacks some Mobipocket features such as javascript.
Portable Document Format
Format: Adobe Portable Document Format
Published as: .pdf
A file format created by Adobe Systems, initially to provide a standard form for storing printable documents containing a set of page images. The format derives from PostScript, but without language features like loops, and with added support for features like compression, passwords and DRM. Because PDF documents can easily be viewed and printed by users on a variety of computer platforms, they are very common on the World Wide Web. The specification of the format is available without charge from Adobe.
Since the format is designed to reproduce page images, the text traditionally could not be re-flowed to fit the screen width or size. As a result PDF files designed for printing on standard paper sizes are less easily viewed on screens with limited size or resolution, such as those found on mobile phones and e-book readers. Adobe has addressed this drawback by adding a re-flow facility to its Acrobat Reader software, but for it to work the document must be marked for re-flowing at creation[17] — meaning that existing PDF documents won't benefit unless they are tagged and resaved. The Windows Mobile (aka Pocket PC) version of Adobe Acrobat will automatically attempt to tag a PDF for reflow during the synchronization process using an installed plugin to Active Sync. However, this tagging process will not work on most locked or password protected PDF documents. It also doesn't work at present (2009–10) on the Windows Mobile Device Center (the successor to Active Sync) as found in Windows Vista and Windows 7. Thus, automatic tagging support during synchronization is limited to Windows XP/2000.
Multiple products support creating and tagging PDF files, such as Adobe Acrobat, PDFCreator, OpenOffice.org, iText, and FOP, and several programming libraries. Third party viewers such as xpdf are also available. Mac OS X has built-in PDF support, both for creation as part of the printing system and for display using the built-in Preview application.
PDF Files
PDF files are supported on many e-book readers including: Mobipocket, iRex iLiad, iRex DR1000, Sony Reader, Bookeen Cybook, Foxit eSlick, Amazon Kindle (2, 3, International & DX)[citation needed], Barnes & Noble Nook[citation needed], the iPad, PocketBook Reader, Bebook Neo and the Kobo eReader. Also, pdf files can be read on the iPod Touch using the free Stanza app. On iPad, there are also many readers as Stanza, iBook, FlipReader, ...
Scientific papers and books are often found in PDF format. In this case, the problem of showing tables and equations correctly has been dealt with, when the PDF was created. When trying to reflow such text, ereaders typically obtain very poor results[citation needed].
[edit] Plain text files
Format: text
Published as: .txt
E-books in plain text exist. The size in bytes is simply the number of characters, including spaces, and with a new line counting for 1 or 2. For example, the Bible, an 800,000-word book, is about 4 MB.[18] The ASCII standard allows ASCII-only text files to be interchanged and readable on Unix, Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, DOS, and other systems. These differ in their preferred line ending convention and their interpretation of values outside the ASCII range (their character encoding). Conversion of files from one to another line-ending convention is easily possible with free software on all computers.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_e-book_formats