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Behind all this talk of 'innovative ebooks' there's a secret agenda that dares not speak its name (at least not where the consumers can hear).
It's called ... monetisation.
People are absolutely right in saying that the web already offers us the tools to do pretty much anything we might desire with multimedia, and will continue to advance at a faster pace than any offshoot format. But the problem with the web is that it's hard to get people to pay for it. When people talk about 'innovation' in ebooks they're often really talking about ways in which they can package the web into a different container, one which customers might be willing to buy.
The sad fact is that this has almost nothing to do with actual books, which people have been buying for centuries, and continue to buy in electronic form. It's about rescuing the magazine market, whose disposable content has been decimated by the web.
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