Quote:
Originally Posted by DixieGal
I can envision, for instance, medical texts with demonstration videos embedded. That would be wonderful.
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That's the sort of thing I was thinking of. The problem will be costs. Textbooks are already expensive. Doing something like this would require two separate and parallel development efforts, as it's not just a case of "Save as PDF for print, Save As ePub for eBook". (Though it's not really there now, as while AdobeInDesign can create ePub files, it doesn't do it very well.)
It will help a lot if/when publishers move to XML as the back end storage format, converting Word docs to XML, and then doing markup and the like on it. XML is a good intermediate format, with tools there to handle much of the work of transforming to the desired output format.
I don't expect a common ebook format any time soon, but a common input format that can be transformed into the desired output format would help a lot.
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Dennis