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Distribution

Of these, the main contenders appear to be HTML, ASCII, PDF, and recently XML. The various distribution formats, HTML, ASCII, PDF and XML are widespread, but are usually used in low-level, non-critical, and non-commercial formats. Microsoft Reader 2.0, Mobipocket Reader, Palm eReader and Adobe Acrobat Reader are in widespread use. ExeBook and DesktopAuthor are making some inroads on the PC, but are not nearly as widespread. TeX is usually considered too complex for general use, but its advanced formatting abilities are very important in technical writing. The distribution choice of format, to some extent, depends on the aims of the publisher of the ebook.

Devices
Currently available purpose-built ebook reading devices include the Cybook (from Bookeen [1], available in English and French versions from their web shop), the Librie (from Sony, available in Japan only), the eBookwise 1150 (from ebookwise.com [2]) and the Hiebook (from Hiebook, available in Korea only). The advantage of these devices lies in their large display and design providing the best immersive reading conditions. Formerly available devices include the Rocket eBook (Nuvomedia) which preced the eBookwise 1150, the Softbook (Softbook) and the eBookman (Franklin).

Many Personal digital assistant (PDA) devices, such as PocketPC or Palm, allow to read ebooks since their inception. As the PDA market represent millions of customers worldwide, PDAs remain a popular sector for reading ebooks.

Projects
Ebook projects generally fall into two camps (ed. though the creators and publishers are often unclear as to which camp they belong):

New Creation: Publishing solely online editions, where exact reproduction of printed matter is unimportant.
Reproduction: Accurate reproduction of existing paper editions, where it becomes important to preserve features of the original, such as pagination.
The Internet Public Library, the first public library of and for the Internet community, is an experiment trying to discover and promote the most effective roles and contributions of librarians to the Internet and vice versa.

There are many reproduction projects on the Internet. Project Gutenberg is a project to create an archive of ebooks, having started in 1971. Project Gutenberg may claim to be the earliest project to create an archive of ebooks. Many other projects have followed, mostly based on public domain texts (which themselves are often derived from Project Gutenberg). Some of these include:

John Mark Ockerbloom's Online Books Page, hosted by the library of the University of Pennsylvania.
The Oxford Text Archive, hosted by the Arts and Humanities Data Service.
Making of America (MoA), a digital library of primary sources in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction.
While no single directory of available ebooks exists, see List of digital library projects for links to articles and external sites for many digital library projects.

E-publishing ventures
Publishers are producing ebooks and now in the 21st century some publishers are expanding the market. For commercial publication, some publishers believe that digital rights management is all important, and tends to override other considerations in the choice of format. Many publishers are reluctant to produce ebooks over fears of piracy and it wasn't until the 21st century that many publishers considered it a worthwhile forum. Recent history has seen players such as Microsoft, Adobe and Mobipocket enter the market with purpose built software which addresses the right management needs of commercial publishers.

Alternatively, other publishers have found that making ebooks available without digital rights management can expand the market penetration of their paper books. Notable in this movement is Baen Books and National Academies Press. Baen and NAP make all their new books available in non-DRM formats, and have made a profit from its e-publishing, and the Baen Free Library is an experiment with making the full text of books available free for download. To date, Baen authors claim that this has increased their sales. Similarly National Academies Press publishes all of its 2,500 books both in free online editions and in priced printed editions and claims that the free editions stimulate sales of the priced editions. (See National Academies Press info site for their rationale.) Additionally MIT Press claims that freely downloadable copies of their textbooks have increased paper sales.

The 1988 ebook of William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive is a classic in the world of epublishing, and, on March 14, 2000, Stephen King's Riding the Bullet was downloaded by half a million people (only the first part of the book was free, and King gave up when he couldn't get enough people to pay for the remaining parts). The popular ebookstore and e-tailer, Amazon.com, sells ebooks in the two most popular formats, Microsoft's Reader format and Adobe's eBook format. Fictionwise.com is also a popular online ebook store that sells ebooks in a variety of formats, including Mobipocket format. Citing profitability concerns, Barnes and Noble stopped selling ebooks in 2003. Mobipocket was acquired by Amazon.com in April 2005.

The lack of legitimate ebooks has led to rapid growth of the number of unlicensed (non-DRM) ebooks being produced, a growth which still continues - most significantly in the genres of science fiction and fantasy. This has resulted in the number of unlicensed ebooks outnumbering the licensed ebooks by several orders of magnitude. Many authors are beginning to self-publish their works as ebooks distributed under the terms of Creative Commons licenses.

Recent attempts to revive ebooks include ExeBook and DesktopAuthor, ebook compilers that produce a simulated book onscreen. These formats are not nearly as popular as others (notably PDF, PDB, MS Reader and Mobipocket) due to their PC-only nature not being available on other platforms (such as Macintosh, Linux, and Palm), fear of EXE files picking up viruses, and a general reluctance by publishers to move away from popularly accepted formats.

A press release issued by The Open eBook Forum (OeBF), early December 2003, reports more than 1-million ebooks sold over the first 3 quarters of 2003. [3] OeBF 2003 third quarter analysis, based on data from ebook publishers and retailers, shows strong double-digit growth over the same period in 2002, in three aspects:

Number of units solds
Revenue from sales
Number of published titles
Attempts are underway to create a standard format for ebooks, notably by The Open eBook Forum (OeBF), based on XML/XHTML.

Government documents
Some government agencies have begun experimenting with the use of electronic book technologies for certain books (especially those containing legally mandated technical standards). In the case of a few books, the printing of the paper version has been discontinued to save money, and the version available on the Web is now the sole official version for legal purposes. The Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices is the best example of this practice.