Digital publications or – in this
case – eBooks are books as a file,
which can be read on a monitor or can
be printed out. eBooks try to combine
the advantages of a classical book with
computer files and networks. You can read
and refer to it like a normal book and
distribute, get and store it like a file.
Even sound samples can be integrated –
from music or art performances a.s.o.
– to get a real multimedia product.
At Science-Digital we prefer Adobe's
portable document format (PDF) which is
a quasi standard for digital publishing.
The program for reading the file, the
former Acrobat Reader, now Acrobat, is
free. It grants that every reader on a
Windows-PC, a Mac or a Linux machine or even mobile reader will see
the same text with the identical layout.
This means eBooks can be fully cited like
other books in contrast to internet pages
Our experience with the scientific journal ProtoSociology has shown an already good acceptance of
eBooks in the scientific community. Especially
the international libraries orded
only digital versions of our journal within
the last years. And they are strengthening
their involvement because digital publications
are cheaper, easier to handle, can be
shared with other users or libraries and
they don't get lost or stolen.
To eBooks applies also the well-known sentence that a new media doesn't oust the old one from its position, but leads to a restructuring. This means to use the strengths of digital publications without making a principle decision for or against paper books
