Digital Books vs Paper Books

The single most important difference is that print books have static layouts, where as ebooks have dynamic layouts. This is because most esbooks are formatted with reflowable text.

A reflowable text is "the ability to automatically wrap words in a document to the next line as the user changes the window size an thereby relocates margin of the page.

Because the ebook text “flows” to adjusts to the size of the screen, ebooks do not have pages as in a print book. Since they do not have pages, they do not have page numbers. As they do not have page numbers, one cannot use page numbers as a means of navigating and referencing in a table of contents or index. Instead, one has a table of contents that is hyperlinked to the individual chapters and/or sections of the book. Instead of an index, the reader will use the ereader’s search function to search for specific words or topics.

As ebooks do not have pages, there are a few other things found in ebooks are different in print books. There aren’t headers or footers in an ebook. Footnotes become “end notes”. Also, to ensure the predictability of placement, images must be in line with the text and centered. Most eReaders at this time do not accept charts, tables and columns, so these must be converted into an image first.

Readers also have the use of the ereader's search function to navigate throughout the book.