n. A paper book.
2000
As plenty of e-book experts (e-xperts?) say, the printed book is a pretty perfect technology. It's cheap, easy to use, familiar and it needs no batteries. It's even beautiful. So p-books will exist, for now.
2000
E-books range in price from $ 1 for Dean Wesley Smith's Star Trek: S.C.E. #1: The Belly of the Beast to double-digit figures for books such as Susan Sontag's In America ($ 26), and they can be downloaded in seconds. E-books, in general, cost the same or are cheaper than their p-book versions.
1999 (earliest)
Welcome to the wacky world of E-books, where it's a foregone conclusion that digital tomes will eventually supplant fusty paper "P-books," but nobody quite knows how to make it happen. Two new devices suggest just how long a haul it could be.
As this word shows, the apparently inevitable e-book revolution is forcing the language to change in anticipation. Within a few years, using the word "book" without any kind of modifier will be confusing because people won't know if you're talking about a book printed on paper or one that's printed on electrons (so to speak). So I predict that p-book (or pbook, which I've also seen) will become a common noun that will help us distinguish between the paper and electronic formats.
In linguistic circles, a word such as p-book is known as a retronym: a word formed from an older word by attaching a previously unnecessary modifier. For example, there was a time when the words guitar, mail, and transmission were unambiguous. However, the advent of the electric guitar, e-mail, and the automatic transmission forced the creation of the retronyms acoustic guitar, snail mail, and manual transmission.
In linguistic circles, a word such as p-book is known as a retronym: a word formed from an older word by attaching a previously unnecessary modifier. For example, there was a time when the words guitar, mail, and transmission were unambiguous. However, the advent of the electric guitar, e-mail, and the automatic transmission forced the creation of the retronyms acoustic guitar, snail mail, and manual transmission.