While the Cinemage system has been primarily used to deliver text and image files it is fully capable of delivering other types of media files as well. One such example is downloadable electronic books, or ebooks. We have created a demonstration service to show how the Cinemage system can be used to provide a catalogue of ebooks. The customer can browse through the catalogue, select a book, pay for it, and download it immediately. Use of the book once downloaded is dependent on having the appropriate hardware and software for displaying it. Items in our demonstration service make use of the Adobe Acrobat Ebook Reader software, which can be downloaded for free from the Adobe web site.
Ebooks were initially greeted with some skepticism by the public, largely because of the lack of suitable technology for displaying the text. Who would want to curl up for a good read with a lap-top computer? There are now ebook readers on the market that are the size and weight of a regular book and the displays have improved significantly. Such readers often include such features as back-lighting for easy night-time reading, the ability to change the display font size, and the ability to do sophisticated searches of the text.