Quote:
Originally Posted by teh603
Just no. Too much potential for abuse by big publishing houses that can afford multimedia to embed. It'd destroy the selfpub revolution we've been having.
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Exactly.
If the book relies on the servers to be available it is useless without the online connection and becomes a webapp.
The issue here is usage patterns: ebooks and pbooks are used in very similar ways and both are used differently from websites and bookapps. He has his visions of what he thinks an ebook should be that are out of line with what the paying customers need and want. That is why I brought up the "television" analogy; to academics it literally is tele-vision--distant viewing--a one-way communication medium. To the masses and the market it is TV: an entertainment medium and purveyor of distractions, not education. No amount of moaning or speechifying has changed it in 70 years and its not going to change it now.
What the prof is bemoaning is that ebooks aren't used as websites-in-a-wrapper, which is in fact a fair description of epub3 which has so far even failed to materialize for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the market isn't exactly clamoring for all those fancy features.
He has his vision, but the market is its creature and has its own priorities.
Enhanced ebooks, via app or epub3, are about as significant to the ebook world as large format eink readers: academics clamor for them and they are truly useful... to a tiny niche that is not economically viable. Yes, ebooks could be many things. But what the market needs it to be *now* is a massless improvement upon paperbacks.
Bemoaning that the market serves the masses instead of his narrow vision is to be out of touch with reality. Economics has its own COLD EQUATIONS, too.