Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Yes, the market for the mid-90's coffee table CD-ROMs didn't go very far for the same reasons these rich content "ebooks" aren't going very far any time soon. Lack of standards, device specificity, low volume/high prices vicious circle, and aiming at the consumer market instead of the educational/academic market.
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For me, this kind of misses the point. I think those CD-ROMs failed because the nobody wants to sit at a PC to read that kind of content. Something tells me that there is going to be an onslaught of tablet devices hitting the market in the next 12 months, and they are going to redefine what computers are used for.
On the flip side, as ebooks start to scoop up more market share of the pure text reading (stuff like paperback novels), it's going to push up the overhead for the print versions of coffee-table books and textbooks, so we'll see what happens in to that marketplace. Maybe, in 10 years, the only cost effective way to publish a coffee-table book will be for a tablet computer.