"Ebooks", "digital books" - is there a difference?
By Paul Biba
Found this at Lorcan Dempsey’s weblog. He’s looking into the distinction between "ebooks" and "digital books" from a librarian’s standpoint. In the library context there is evidently a distinction being drawn.
I was in a meeting with a group of folks from research libraries the other week. I was interested in a particular terminological issue: ‘ebooks’ and ‘digital books’ were each being used in conversation. I asked was there a pattern of consistent use here. ‘Not complete consistency’ was the answer, but there was certainly a tendency to use ‘ebooks’ for materials available for license from external providers, and a tendency to use ‘digital books’ for materials digitized from library collections.
So, in this context, it is easy to see how each expression has a different - if overlapping - set of associations. Ebooks may evoke an environment currently fragmented by provider platforms, with restrictions on use, and managed in a licensed e-resource workflow. They are for reference, information, reading. Digital books may evoke a digital library environment, an aspiration to provide higher level research services based on text mining, entity identification, and so on, and various funding and cooperative initiatives which aim to increase the corpus. The Monk Project or the international Digging into Data Challenge are examples of a direction here.
August 21st, 2009 at 9:04 pm
Sounds to me like the libraries have decided that the word “e-book” carries a commercial connotation that is distasteful to them, and they are trying to disassociate themselves from crass commercialism. For the only difference between “e-book” and “digital book” is semantics.
But as there are those of us who believe “e-book” is a fad-word, destined to be dropped when electronic files are not considered so unique, I don’t mind if the library wants to call e-books by another name. “Digital book” is a bit long, IMO, but keep working on it…