E-book

An e-book (for electronic book: also ebook: also ecobook) is the digital media equivalent of a conventional printed book. Such documents are usually read on personal computer, or on dedicated hardware devices known as e-book reader or e-book devices. An e-book is a specialised type of e-text. In 1971 Michael Hart was handed a real boon--$100,000.00 worth of computer time with a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computer. He decided that the greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries. The first "e-book" was born--a copy of the Declaration of Independence. Those humble beginnings would become Project Gutenberg. Today Project Gutenberg houses 20,000 free texts and over 100,000 books are available through their partners. Over 3,000,000 books are downloaded each month. E-books appeared on the web, easily shared and stored on a hard drive or storage disk, and quickly began to proliferate. Early... full article at wikipedia