Hugh McGuire, founder of LibriVox (a volunteer project to create public domain audiobooks) has a blog entry today at The Book Oven Blog discussing the different approaches to creating eText for the iPod Touch and the more "traditional" electonic book devices like the Kindle and the Sony Reader.
Quote:
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eBooks, and digital devices are a different medium, they call for a whole new design approach. The constraints are different, the reader’s needs different, and so how you’ll design a text is going to be different. I was shocked that with the iPod, the small screen actually seems to me an *advantage* over the paper book in some ways. And so where Kindle & Sony Reader have tried to reinvent the book in electronic form, using the same kinds of design principles, the ereaders on the iPhone/iPod have instead tried to build a new kind of design/interaction standard into existing constraints of devices people already have. I find the second approach more compelling because it’s adding real value where before there was none.
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It's an interesting discussion, and in some ways goes back to the argument advanced by Doctorow and others that ebooks will never catch on unless they are an application to a multipurpose device. And that this requires a new approach to text design, rather than just mimicking a paper book.
Read more
here.