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Old 01-11-2012, 07:44 PM   #28
bigtext
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bigtext has never been to obedience school.bigtext has never been to obedience school.bigtext has never been to obedience school.bigtext has never been to obedience school.bigtext has never been to obedience school.bigtext has never been to obedience school.bigtext has never been to obedience school.bigtext has never been to obedience school.bigtext has never been to obedience school.bigtext has never been to obedience school.bigtext has never been to obedience school.
 
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Join Date: Jan 2012
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Quote:
Do you believe that, once such a standard-based infrastructure is in place, that we will witness almost instantaneous conversion of all printed material to rich media publications?
No, but I'm not suggesting that. And maybe I misread some of your original context, but ultimately the point of my posts is that EPUB3, when it arrives, eliminates the need for a separate app to be created for each book. An author is not going to need to go out and hire a Java or Objective C programmer to get their content out there. They are going to be able to use an open standard that they are probably already familiar with if they've worked with EPUB. HTML and CSS are easy to get. HTML5 makes adding video and audio links a piece of cake. Javascript and canvas pieces are a bit more complicated. Sure someone has to create the media content, but I see an incentive for publishers to keep authors from going independent by providing easy access to people who can help animate and create voices for their books.

I'm sure the publisher is involved with the process of hooking up the author for books on tape. If animated books can create more demand and more sales for the publisher and help keep authors from going independent then there is a strong incentive for them to support this technology. I think this is most likely in the area of children's books and textbooks. I'm not sure what will happen with novels.

Here is a possibility. Let's say Stephen King released his book 11/22/1963 in 2016 instead of last year. So EPUB3 is in place. If Stephen King likes this technology, he could suggest that video clips be added of some of the significant events around the JFK assassination. Then he could provide links to newspaper articles. Now you can buy the hard back version of King's new JFK book or you can buy the more expensive, and justifiably so they would so, media rich ebook.

All these could be put up on the publisher's website and has the added benefit of allowing the publisher to collect more data on the number of reader's and such. It's also a way to track pirating and get a better handle on how their ebooks are being used. Do I expect this to happen to every book. Most definitely not. We do not have books-on-tape versions of all books and I expect rich media books to be an even smaller percentage of books than those converted to audio. Especially since many novels aren't going to work with this format.

As we can see with the web things change very fast. Of course it depends on what one means by fast. I continue to be amazed at how different the web looks and acts since I first started using it in the mid 90s. Its not hard for me to imagine a changed landscape in books in ten years. Hopefully not the kind of books I read.
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