E-BOOKS have since the advent of the Internet in the early 1990s represented a fundamental and quality leap in the presentation of human knowledge, particularly insofar as the curation, accumulation and provision of knowledge are concerned. Benefiting mainly from the later convergence of telecom and media technologies, the Internet has emerged the medium of choice for the online exercise of the largest and most diverse human activities, including culture and learning in the foremost. In due course, the rise of the Internet facilitated the birth of the e-book – a development which is now shaping the history of learning and culture as did the shift from the handwritten manuscript to the printed text in the mid-15th Century, a few years after the invention of the modern mechanical printing press. It may even be considered a more significant evolution if gauged by the swiftness of the service it delivers, the almost unlimited reach to readers of all interests and the ease of storage and retrieval. Even when print text publishers appended alphabetical indexes to texts, the traditional textbook continued to pose tangible difficulties to readers and researchers especially in terms of the time that has to be spent on tracing or locating index keywords in bulky texts, let alone the necessity of having to repeat the whole process every time a need arises to renew the search. And there indeed are so many other advantages that the e-book offers to readers and researchers. Consider, to mention only a few such advantages, the luxury of storing e-books on hand-held cellular devices and tablets, and now on the cloud, while on the go, worrying not of having to return the physical place where the print book is kept, the ease of storing all books one wants to read or refer to, which should otherwise have required big cases to carry, and the privilege of instantaneous swapping of texts and/or links with colleagues and friends.
For all these and other advantages, the e-book represents a watershed and highly useful development in the associated processes of acquiring, verifying and enriching human knowledge. The development becomes all the more valuable in the case of academic books and reference materials; hence the tremendous merit of the ongoing project to digitise university textbooks that Higher Education and Scientific Research Minister Khaled Abdul-Ghaffar revealed in recent statements. An insight into the significance of this project would point directly to its key role as an organic part of the state’s multi-level moves to realise digital transformation and spread it in almost all walks of economic, social and cultural life. Needless to say, such moves are not an end in themselves but rather an effective approach to the achievement of comprehensive and sustainable development. In addition to reflecting the state’s orientation to optimise the utilisation of the digital and informatics infrastructure that has energetically been developed over the past years, university book digitisation would immensely factor in widening the base of digital transformation and spreading its applications, certainly to the benefit of the drive for modernising all sectors of the national economy as well as the social, cultural and scientific aspects of life.
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