It used to be that paper books were king. They were real. You could hold them in your hands, take them anywhere with you, and put them on bookshelves. They have nice covers that (Sometimes) tell you about books in exciting terms.

When Gutenberg invented printing he brought an entire civilization out of dark ages.

I love paper books and use them all time. My wife is a teacher and paper books help her tremendously. Especially useful are picture books with big beautiful informative pictures. I hope these paper books never go away.

Ray Bradbury’s futuristic novel “Fahrenheit 451” is spooky. In story government hires firefighters to burn books. That is scary, burning books so that people cannot have access to them.

Yet burning books has happened historically. An invader burned great library in Alexandria. And there have been others. They have all been great losses.

In recent years we have been seeing a new form of book, ebook.

My introduction to ebook was a few years ago when a discovered Project Gutenberg web site. Here I found stories that I had read and loved years ago as a boy. Many have been out of print for years.

I also found books by some of my favorite authors that I had not read or even known of. It was a “treasure” web site for me.

And ebooks could be copied and pasted into Microsoft Word and then printed out. I printed out many of my favorites and read them. I still visit Project Gutenberg site, and others like it, regularly looking for new treasures.

Here are web address for Project Gutenberg and five other sites that I like from which you can read or download stories, fiction, and non-fiction.

http://gutenberg.net

http://www.bibliomania.com/

http://gaslight.mtroyal.ca/

http://www.web-books.com/cool/ebooks/Library.htm

http://www.classicreader.com

http://www.pinkmonkey.com/dl/all.asp

The Marketing ebook

A couple of years ago I started marketing on Internet. It wasn’t soon before I discovered marketing ebook.

The marketing ebooks differed considerably from Project Gutenberg ebooks.

The Project Gutenberg books were generally all text with not pictures, images, or links. You could read them on screen or copy them to an edit for reading there or for printing.

The marketing ebooks contained text, images, links to web pages, and navigation controls. And all of marketing ebooks were new to me.

At first most of marketing ebooks came in an EXE format. This format delivers ebook to reader in one EXE file, which can be opened from windows like a program.

Lately more and more Ebooks are being published in PDF format. To read PDF format you must have an Adobe reader. Adobe readers can be downloaded free.

The advantages of EXE format are that you can take HTML code and compile it into an EXE format ebook. It can an offline website. Just about any feature that you can put into a web site can be put into an EXE format ebook. This includes sounds, animated graphics, hyperlinks to other parts of eBook, and hyperlinks to web pages. There is a tremendous amount of flexibility here.