Quote:
Originally Posted by sirmaru
Our present eBook technology is merely a waystation to the future.
|
In some sense, both the traditional books, including the papyrus ones, and the ebooks are but a way to present a text on a limited two-dimensional surface and a means to advance to the next portion of the text, so the really big picture here is not technology, but books and reading.
However, while the basic concept of a book is ancient history and practically immutable, technological changes have always enabled more books and more reading by making it cheaper and easier to create and duplicate texts, with digital storage, duplication, and format conversion being the pinnacle of this long technological evolution.
So, the emergence of digital technologies is actually a "pro-traditional-text" development, whose benefits have not been fully realizable, because the current ebook DRM technologies, created to counter the very ease of digital copying and format conversion, have been designed without much thought for making them viable in the environment of rapid technological change. Until these issues are properly addressed, customers will complain, with good reason.