What is an eBook?
Internet Marketing Dictionary | eBooks

An eBook is a downloadable file that can be printed out to form a book.  There are many advantages to ebooks compared to physcal books.

First they can be delivered electronically over the internet which means that ebooks can be delivered virtually instantly. This is gratifying for the purchaser who then does not have to wait for shipment.

Second, they cost virtually nothing to produce once the original text has been written because they don't have a cover and don't use paper - unless they are printed in which case it is the purchaser who pays for the printing and not the publisher. This makes them very high margin products to sell because the cost of production and shipment is effectively zero.

Third they can include active links to web pages in them. This is a popular way of driving traffic to specific web pages.

Most internet marketers use the PDF format for ebooks either writing their books using a word processor such as Word and converting the finished book into a PDF using a PDF conversion utility. More recently authors have started to use OpenOffice which is a free word processing system which proides the option of saving documents directly into PDF format.

To make an ebook seem more tangible, many authors also use eCovers.