Quote:
Originally Posted by BWinmill
In a sense, I think they had to make ebooks "better" than print books. Portability was seriously lacking back then, even in terms of laptops. (Laptops were much larger, somewhat heavier, and incredibly expensive.) So it would have hard to sell an ebook as a straightforward book. Throw in some extra features though, and a few people would nibble. That was particularly true in education markets which were going ga-ga over multimedia back then.
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Certainly there there problems - whatever approach they took - but by starting heavy and whiz-bang they compounded their problems right at the start (size, compatibility/portability, expense, taste etc.), never giving smaller, simpler and cheaper solutions a chance (and which could then evolve). It's not unexpected that companies would try what they did at that time, but their approach automatically limited both their supply and their market. Software development has learned a lot about the advantages of evolution in that time (in some places at least).