Quote:
Originally Posted by calvin-c
This reminds me of the early days of CD's. The CD industry touted their ability to hold an hour or more of music-but 98% of all CD's contained the same 30 minutes of music that was on the LP and nothing more. Today the industry has evolved & we have many 'enhanced' CD's. They don't affect how the music plays on a CD player so I'm not really sure how prevalent they are-I just know they're out there. They might affect how the CD plays on a computer but I prefer wearing out my sub-$100 CD player for music rather than my over-$500 PC. I guess I'm funny that way as I still replace lots of CD (DVD) drives that were worn out playing music all day.
Presumably ebooks will go a similar route, i.e. at first (now) they offer nothing more but eventually they'll be 'enhanced'. Hopefully the enhancements will be controllable, i.e. we'll be able to turn them off if we don't want them.
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Ugh, bad example. I hate, hate, hate "enhanced" CDs, and will definitely not buy one if I can help it. They're always designed to be difficult to rip to MP3, which is the first thing I want to do with a CD. Doesn't prevent anyone from pirating them, and in fact that's usually how I get the MP3 version of the CD if they make it hard to rip.
I think that adding too much multimedia to a book would definitely break the paradigm. It would basically be a multimedia website at that point. Which is fine, but it's no longer a book.
You could put links to external content in the footnotes, I suppose, but those links are all going to be dead inside of 5-10 years. I'd prefer having everything self-contained.
In terms of making graphics more future-proof, one thing that can be done is to put them in a vector format like SVG. It makes the graphics far more compact in file size, and they scale up and down much better. I don't know which ebook standards support that, though, if any.