EBooks are “text in digital form, or digital reading material, or a book in a computer
file format, or an electronic file of words and images” (Rao, 2003, pp. 86-87). EBooks
are downloadable and are portable if they are stored in light portable devices such as
pocket personal computers (PPCs) or smartphones.
The technology has also made possible a growth in the number of publications with
shorter publishing times. The rising costs of paper books and the potential to link
multimedia resources to eBooks have major impacts on the strategies used by
university libraries in their support of scholarly communication (Ching, Poon &
McNaught, 2006). There are 247 entries in a list of available eBook libraries
(Cavanaugh & Cavanaugh, 2008). One of the largest collections of academic eBooks
collections is NetLibrary, which at present has over 20,000 volumes of academic eBooks.