The piece and attendant video:
What Electronic-Book Interfaces Looked Like 20 Years Ago
Andrew Hearst's blog entry also links to this alternately amusing and obvious piece on why early e-books failed:
http://alfabravo.com/2011/08/early-e...y-they-failed/
A friend who used to work for Voyager Co. made his living for years afterward honing a database/presentation package -- again, using Macromedia Director. Most of his clients were diehards who for one reason or another hated Premiere. You might call them reactionaries in the sense that they spent decades clinging to what had rapidly become old tech.
I've often thought of how quickly CD-ROM books became unplayable and/or obscure as systems vied for dominance and programming language versions were superseded or fell into disuse. Presuming that those same issues still existed, I didn't pay attention to epub at first. In a word, oops.