Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
Lest we forget, there is one piece of technology, capable of reading ebooks, that is fast on the rise even in developing countries: Cellphones.
I'm not saying things aren't harder in developing countries; just that technology manages to reach further into the poorest nations, becoming easier to get and maintain as it scales down and becomes less expensive. I daresay keeping a cellphone with ebooks on it would be easier than keeping an expensive POD printer running.
Oh, about the comment about print being backwards-compatible: How old is your copy of Macbeth? Print books of old stories are around because they are reprinted. And some of the oldest stories couldn't be read in their original manuscripts by the average reader today, because of the differences in old languages and letters/spellings. Digital texts are much more easily updated with changes in language, spelling and translation.
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1) Mobile phones are more common in developing countries but that does not necessarily translate to using it for reading eBooks.
It's more conducive in some countries depending on the language--Japan and China's language for example uses ideograms so they require less screen space, explaining the proliferation of the cellphone novel in those territories--but doesn't automatically translate to all cultures.
2) Print is actually quite sturdy. The problem with electronic text is support of format. Most people don't have computers that can read floppy disks for example. Support for old file types will be the next problem. Neither .mobi nor .epub were the first eBook formats. That they're currently what's widely in use is contrived (Mobi due to Amazon pushing the format, ePub by the IDPF). And even then, those formats continue to evolve and change. (The Kindle 8 format for example won't necessarily be supported by non-Kindle Fire readers and there are differences between ePub 3 vs. ePub 2.)
A good print book will reasonably last a few decades. How long has .Lit supported?