Quote:
Originally Posted by Argel
This is one of the crucial points for me, though I realize that it is difficult for publishers.
I don't simply want the right to read a text. This is supposed to be the information age and I want the text of my books to be information in the same way as other data on my system.
The reader is only one 'limb' of that system. I also want to be able to search and copy on my main PC, using the kind of office software around which most of my work revolves. In other words I want my books to become as much a part of my 'digital memory' as my other 'documents' - and as accessible.
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I think that this is something that many people overlook - they focus on reading e"books" and don't move away from the paper paradigm of books being separate entities on a bookshelf. Being digital changes everything.
I'm not personally interested in using books as a source of data but certainly want that capability. I also think it is crazy that so much of our culture is locked up in books and hence not easily searchable as so much of the content on the internet is. I know Google are trying to rectify this but really, we're doing things backward here.
But my main interest is integrating "ebooks" with my normal browsing experience. I read a lot of stuff on my reading devices - RSS feeds, webpages, websites, magazine articles, editorials etc, as well as "ebooks" themselves. Almost all of this information is found while web browsing, so ways of immediately getting this into a format and on to a reading device is a priority.
I have an article about this at
http://hindesite.wordpress.com/artic...book-workflow/
Of course, this discussion becomes somewhat redundant when in the future we have always-connected devices which changes everything once again. No need to convert files before local storage; more difficult for vendors to segregate their products.
Formats then become as relevant as they are to everyday web browsing.