[Salgueiros]

What is an innovative ebook?

I do think that a ebook with sound, videos, etc, will not be a ebook, will be something else. I have nothing against the creation of a new type of media, but i disagree that people who read books and ebooks need a new type of "thing". Text is rich enough to provide fabulous experiences to people who are capable and enjoy that mode of transmission, and i quite often find that adding extras deviates effort from attaining good quality texts and create a hybrid where text is so-so in the add-ins do not provide anything really valuable. It is like trading a paper Britannica for a digital early edition of Encarta... my goodness that thing was awful... too many multimedia that added nothing and too little substance.

Besides, reading is a fabulous immersive activity that is killed with too many distractions. I never feel the book i am reading (in case it is a novel) or think properly about the reasoning (if i am reading a philosophy essay) if i don't let my brain "breathe" and too many buttons, or videos or sounds make it impossible to attain that bare psychological landscape where the written words ressonate optimally.

Of course technical books are different, for example seeing 3-D molecular structures in a 2-D screen is frequently complicated, and video (or a hologram, who knows?) could improve the learning value of the ebook.