Overview

E-books have reached a significant level of acceptance in academic and research libraries as a result of the gradual evolution of public acceptance of e-books, a current review of the role e-books play in the university library's support of researchers and students' learning is necessary. Awareness of e-books is still not at an optimal level in part because students, research scholars and faculty are not fully aware of the presence of e-books in library collections (Lonsdale and Armstrong, 2008). Electronic book has become a permanent fixture in the world of research. Due to the rapid development and innovation in information technology, the dedicated electronic book reader has become a new trend in reading. The emergence of the e-book reader and other handheld devices for delivering and presenting texts has changed everything. Although the e-book delivered via computer screen dates back to the birth of Project Gutenberg in the early 1970s, the first handheld devices for reading books did not appear until the late 1990s, when portable computing beyond the notebook first became a reality. Rocket e-book and Soft Book were the first e-book readers. Rocket e-book had to be connected to a PC and came with a capacity of 4 or 16 megabytes, or about 16,000 pages of text; Soft Book could store only 2 megabytes, but it had an internal modem and phone jack to download files directly from the larger popular trade publishers and major news magazines. These first devices were novelties, however, and despite some early adopters, mainly among public libraries, who quickly discovered that the technology had a very short shelf life, the limitations made their impact negligible upon what was, at the time, a mostly web-based e-book market. When Amazon, the largest online book retailer in the USA, launched its first generation Kindle device in 2007, the e-book reader finally came of age. With its much-touted e-ink display, a storage capacity of several gigabytes rather than a few megabytes, and the ability to search for and download titles wirelessly, the Kindle changed the landscape of electronic publishing.

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