Quote:
Originally Posted by GregS
In terms of giving shape to market, file format is critical, epub seems close enough to mobileread format that transforming it automatically would not be all that difficult. Buyers should not ever be concerned with formats, just the ebooks. Epub serves well for most fiction, there are a few things which should be mandatory (such as Section-chapter-paragraph numbered ids and unique IDs for the publication and edition - I would also add shelving information re the Universal Decimal system), but these things can be dealt with in the fullness of time.
Complex non-fiction is another matter, and that a standard that includes some form of PDF-like stylesheet that generates typographically true pages designed for the particular reader is not yet even on the drawing boards as far as I can find out. But again that needs time to emerge. Epub is to my mind THE critical keystone for providing a large and growing market in ebooks.
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Agreed here. I haven't spent enough time with ePub to know how well it is suited for more complex works, like textbooks, but if it isn't there yet, I'm sure it can be brought up to that level.
(By the way: If you don't want to read SF, there's always
Lambs Hide, Tigers Seek!
)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Liviu_5
I like and read e-books, so of course I would like them to succeed. However, even if interesting all this discussion seems to me that is somewhat missing the main point, which is that paper books have a very well defined ecological place in our culture and the e-book experience overall really needs to offer very tangible advantages to make serious inroads.
Simplicity, durability and easy access are VERY powerful advantages and right now e-books have a long way to go in all those categories compared to print.
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I think e-books are closer to that point than you might think... in fact, poised to become as major a part of literature as MP3s are to music now. That's why the proper publishing model, applied now, could push them over the edge.