Electronic Books
Electronic books are online equivalents of printed paper. Very little modern writing is
actually published on the web, although you can find sites with the text of old books
available. Almost all commercial publishing is also done on paper. There are three main
reasons for this:
- It is far easier to enforce payment when the text is on paper.
- Unless you use special tools when you publish your work, it is next to impossible to
protect your copyright if you publish your text online. Standard word processor formats
and HTML can be changed by anyone with a compatible word processor or editor program.
- Books are more portable, and don't need a power supply or batteries.
The advent of CD-Roms and HTML viewers makes it more attractive to publish books on
CD-Roms, but the HTML source can still be copied into a word processor. There are
solutions to these problems however, provided an author takes some precautions.
See Publishing Electronic Books.
