Quote:
Originally Posted by KevinH
Some are looking to take advantage of the digital media to try to do new or interesting things.
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I don't have a problem with "new or interesting things" in eBooks, but I haven't seen a lot of people asking how to do "new or interesting things" using tools like scripting.
I
have seen a lot of people ask questions that are basically "how can I turn an e-reader into a web browser?" That's not really "new or interesting". There's also a lot of questions that really come down to "advanced CSS still isn't quite enough to give me the exact same look across all possible reader sizes and font choices". Having done a lot of that kind of CSS, I fall squarely into the camp of sometimes having to live with "close enough". OTOH, if somebody could come up with a way other than fixed layout to properly render
The Demolished Man on any device, I'd be really interested.
Here's a "new or interesting" thing I have never seen anybody ask how to do, and it's something that has actual application to eBooks:
There has been a lot of discussion about the editing of older books to meet current political correctness, and many readers want to know which version of the book they are getting. How about a system where both versions of the book are in the EPUB, and you choose which you want to read. This is easy to do by having both versions in the file and just picking from a table of contents. The "new and interesting" part would be to have a way to have a single copy of the book, with only the differences being a "duplicate". A button click at the beginning would hide/show the text based on the version chosen. That would be a "new and interesting" use of interactivity, and has real utility for readers, since it keeps the file size much smaller.
An even cooler addition to this would be to optionally highlight the changed text in either version, and allow a click on that specific text to toggle the view of only that change.