What is an Ebook

I thought an ebook would be relatively easy to define, it’s a word in common usage and people use the word all the time, but do they know what it really means? As defined by the Oxford Dictionary an ebook is:

an electronic version of a printed book which can be read on a computer or a specifically designed handheld device.

This may be very all well and good, an electronic version of a book is quite easy to comprehend, but what if there is no book before the ebook? What if someone decides to create an ebook without publishing a physical book first? To get to the root of this statement you need a concrete definition for the word book. Which the Oxford Dictionary defines as:

a written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers

If we take away the irrelevant things from the definition that aren’t relivant in the digital world such as mention of gluing and binding we are left defining an ebook as:

An electronic body of written work, which can be read on a computer or a specifically designed handheld device.

The definition we’ve been left with, I’d argue, is too vague to have any meaning. Under this definition virtually anything written on a computer could be counted as an ebook, including what you are reading now, as it’s a body of work that can be read on a computer.

I’ve been looking at this definition for the past hour and the only way I can see that we can get around the problem of a vague definition is adding back in some of the terms that define a book, specifically the “bound in covers” part. If we say that an ebook is something that has a defined end and is bound in one transferable file. This way something like a blog cannot be defined as an ebook because it is both still being written and is not bound in one file that is easily transferable.

An electronic body of written work, contained in a transferable single file with a defined end, which can be read on a computer or a specifically designed handheld device.

Whether this definition will hold against my other research throughout this project, I don’t know. Ebooks are a tricky subject because of the fact they are so new. Time will tell whether the term enhanced ebooks will stick or they will merge into the same thing, at which point we’d need a new definition of an ebook.

Feel free to let me know bellow if I’ve got the definition completely wrong or you see a hole in my definition.