[ebookreaders]

Originally Posted by Gianfranco

Wonderful!
I believe that the academic authors will continue to write their books in LaTeX, and thus hiring someone to do the conversion to other formats in a smooth way. You don't want to sit with and fight with file format convertion problems once your book is done. I am sure that most of us don't regard PDF as a valid eBook format, it's not reflowable.

Most of our authors (in the field of business administration, social studies, et cetera) work in MS Word. And most of them are quite comfortable applying page settings and margins so that the resulting pdf file can be sent to the printer directly. I consider pdf to be a very valid ebook format, especially with devices with larger screens coming up. I spoke to many people (students, business people) who would just love to have an A4-sized reader, for reading company memos, textbooks, notes, et cetera.

Piracy will always be a problem. Really; I don't think it will ever be possible to produce secure material.

Absolutely right. Just look at what happened to the music industry.

Let me add the other side of the coin, what about environmental costs? In my humble opinion, it's priceless to have a fully functioning environment. The amount of tree mass used to produce all books/papers in the whole world is astounding. One often nails the debate of sustainability onto vehicles (which IS a problem), but fails to forget that all parts of the consumption chain are responsible. Just think of all the millions of books printed, and then just discarded. Given enough time, I think the technology will ease the monetary costs of producing eBooks.

I'd like to see a full break-down of the impact of the production of one ebook reader on the environment first. Of course, lots of paper is wasted, but you can still give a paper book to a friend or have it recycled in a proper way.

Is this not really a format problem? Given a reflowable format, there is no problem.

It is a format problem, even with reflowable books. Have you ever tried to convert a document containing lots of tables, figures and images to a reflowable document? It's a disaster. We have tested several xml-based publishing systems, but even then, formatting a book is more difficult than many people think.

I really hope that you will try to convince other publishers as well as authors to release more academic titles. By the way; do you happen to have some kind of contact with Springer Link?

We do our best . Unfortunately, we're not connected to Springer.