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With the high printing and distribution costs involved in the self-publishing of books, there is another alternative that is beginning to emerge and is worthy of investigation. That alternative is virtual books. They are sometimes referred to as electronic books or diskbased books.
Because of the ever-increasing use of computers in the home for business and personal use, and because of the costs mentioned above, the writing and publishing of electronic books is becoming more practical for many applications. So, what is an electronic, or virtual book? A simple explanation would be to say that an electronic book is a computer floppy disk
on which is contained a disk-reading program and a text file The actual contents of the book). Depending on the type of disk-reader used, the person reading the "book" can start at the beginning, the middle, the end, or any other place, page, chapter, section, etc.
Disk-reading programs are also called text organizers orfile viewers.
Depending, again, on the type and complexity of the disk-reading program used, the author can present to the reader a table of contents or a list of topics from which the reader can select, with just a few keystrokes; and instantly access the desired
material. The slow alternative to reading a long text file without a good file viewer is to scroll through the text from start to finish. At best you can jump ahead or back one page of text at a time, but you will have no capability to preselect a certain page,
word, line, topic, or any other unique location.
So how is it done? Easily! The book or other work is
composed on a
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