Quote:
Originally Posted by stonetools
In an earlier thread, I speculated that booksellers would create a service where they would host books " in the cloud" and stream the books to e-reader devices in return for a monthly subscription fee. People were horrified at the very thought of this . They condemned me as a tool of the publishers, told me that this scheme would destroy the " rights" of ebook consumers and declared that the user experience would necessarily be awful. Now HTML 5 reader apps are viewed as the salvation of ebook consumers, rescuing them from Apple's evil new policies. 
Maybe I was just ahead of my time, or something . |
HTML 5 is like a web page on steroids, and like any other web page, once it is viewed in a browser, it can be locally stored (cached) and can then be accessed without having to download it again. HTML 5 has the power to do a lot of things, and resembles regular apps in capabilities. It also has the power to locally store the content (ebook in this case) that it uses/displays.
So what webapp developers do is write their apps in HTML 5 instead of Java, and use the local browser to execute those, similar to using an interpreter to run a Basic programme in the olden days. They can even create icons on the desktop to run them whilst hiding all the browser stuff. To the average user (and even power user) it looks exactly like running a native app. The browser overhead might slow things down a bit, but for something like an ebook reader it would not be noticeable.