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Originally Posted by Jake
Believe it or not, e-books (or e-texts etc.) can (potentially) be far more powerful (and may I say useful?) than paper books. They can "talk" to other books, show you their contents instantly, announce themselves when they are published, *show* you a medical procedure in video while describing it and referencing other literature sources in print. They can put in your hands (literally) copies of rare source documents you would need several lifetimes (and the travel budget of Bill Gates) to find, if you ever could. Footnotes can link to the actual source in addition to commenting. Can your print book instantly size the type larger for these 50 year old eyes of mine? Can I carry around 100 print novels, 5 fat print dictionaries and an entire print encyclopedia set in the palm of my hand? We have not even scratched the faintest surface of what "digital books" or "digital publishing" could mean. Personally, I'm not so much interested in the death or continued life of paper books, but the nearly limitless potential of digital ones.
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...until the company that makes the device that can read the book in that locked format the publisher sold it to you in goes belly up and nobody buys them out. Until your hard drive crashes and you discover that your backups are unreadable and the publisher won't let you download the books again without paying full price for them. Until the software publisher arbitrarily decides that the software reader you paid them for is actually a pirated copy and they deactivate it on you. Until you buy your seventh computing device and the software publisher decides you have reached your maximum allowance of activated devices and refuses to allow you to activate any more.
These are all problems paper books don't have, but these are very real problems electronic texts have
today . The issue isn't black and white, and no matter what potential electronic texts have, these issues which plauge the digital world that don't exist in the analog world are always going to hold people back.