Quote:
Originally Posted by sdive
In connection with some Uni research I'm doing:
Is it possible to talk of e-book features (searchability, highlighting etc) independently of e-readers? From what I'm gathering e-book development was device driven (this is all very new to me ...).
Are e-books commercially available for PC consumption (excluding PDFs and apps)? I mean, could you talk about e-books for PCs before e-readers took off, apart from special interest books and classics/fiction? Again, what's coming thru is that the e-book market is mainly for dedicated readers or tablets, sometimes smartphones.
Thanks in advance.
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Speaking to the highlighted section of the OP, I think you're sort-of partly right. eBooks are formatted in two common standards, ePub and Mobi, both of these formats are evolving. An open source format called ePub3 and the proprietary KF8, a proprietary Mobi format owned by Amazon and only implemented on their devices and applications, are the latest implementations. These new formats offer considerable flexibility to handle text.
Traditionally, after editing, paper books went to a Book Designer before going to the printer. The book design step could be skipped but the result made the difference between books that were beautiful to look at and easier to read, as well as more expensive.
Early versions of the eReader lacked the ability to do very much in the way of Book Design. The new formats can do most of it but many people still have older devices that are unable to use those features.
Amazon seems to be interested in updating their older models to the new standard where possible, but Adobe, the company writing the Mobile Reader software used by the open format eReaders, has not followed suit. A Canadian/Japanese company called Kobo is developing it's own format, a superset of Adobe ePub, that does implement more of ePub3 while also supporting Adobe Mobile Reader for backward compatibility.
Kobo's newest eReader, the Kobo Aura, is a hardware upgrade that further implements ePub3 and offers better formatted books and better implementation of Japanese, Chinese and Korean pictographs. The Aura is probably a harbinger of the future with a faster CPU, user expandable memory, and a brighter, higher resolution, larger eInk screen in a form factor more like that of a traditional book.
Flexible, color displays and batteries in larger screen sizes continue to be developed probably for the technical and education markets.
I see digital reading as a technology that continues to evolve in the direction of a better reading experience but due to the rapid pace of development there is an interplay between what the newest eReaders can do and the capabilities of the eReaders many (or most) people are presently using.