Preparing for Effective Adoption and Use of Ebooks in Education : Final Report

Abstract

Ebooks have been around for many years: their history can be traced back to initiatives such as Project Gutenberg in the 1970s or formats such as PDF released in the mid 1990s. Handheld ebook reader hardware has been available from the late 1990s. For much of that time, ebooks arguably had little impact outside a few areas of niche interest. In the last few years, however, there has been an increasing stream of stories about ebooks outselling printed books by some measure or another. For example, in August 2012 it was widely reported that Amazon in the UK had sold more ebooks than hard- and paperbacks combined. Although there is of course often an element of advertising hype in many of these stories, they do reflect a real shift in the popularity of ebooks.