E-books, or electronic books, are books stored in digital format that are created, delivered, and read by electronic methods. This means that the book's text may be available on CD-ROM through a computer or encrypted and delivered through a handheld device. The term "e-book" is also used to refer to a dedicated handheld device used to read electronically based text, although these devices should more properly be referred to as e-book readers.

The availability and delivery of the text of books in electronic format is not new. Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.net/) has been providing the text of public domain books free over the Internet since 1971. Computerized texts have several advantages. Compared to a print volume, a computer can store much more text. Computerized text is also much easier to search, and hyperlinks can move the reader easily throughout the text, or from one...