Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
I suspect that pittendrigh is right that an audio/visual enabled ebook format will be useful for non-fiction books.
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From what I could gather, much of the EPUB3 audio/video push was from Education publishers.
Think college/highschool textbooks.
And the only store+reader that really supports those types of EPUB3 is iBooks.
Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
The question is whether there's a big enough market to justify the investment.
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For the little guy, probably not.
On the production side:
Creating those ebooks properly is... exponentially more expensive.
You also have extremely large filesizes, since you must embed all audio/video within the EPUB. (Customers are also no fans of this, especially on devices with barely any storage [like phones/tablets].)
This also raises the "delivery fees" through the roof, which causes expensive minimal pricetags.
On the selling side:
These more complex books are usually only enabled for "the big publishers" (see audio/video on Amazon). Self-publishers + small publishers don't get access to the same upload tools, and there's no way to specify: "This book can only be sold to tablets".
... and then you have the enormous customer support issues too.
If you try to venture away from the big-name stores (Amazon, Kobo, B&N, Apple, [...]), that customer support is falling on you, and it is
crippling.
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Even the enormous Education publishers have mostly given up on that too. See O'Reilly with "Safari Books Online" closing in 2017:
... and, of course, trying to shift to the "subscription model" instead.
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Anyway, here was yet another
The Digital Reader article I found as I was digging through other information:
Yet another reinvention/revolution...