Why We’ll Never Have Innovative E-Books

[din155]

I am not sure about fiction but there are many areas in nonfiction where innovative eBooks can be useful. Various technical training manuals can be made more useful by adding audio/video. I have not come across any innovative fiction book but I can understand the distraction it will add to it.

din

[jgaiser]

Originally Posted by Nancy Fulda

I do wish it had a clock, though.

Ummmm... It does have a clock. Press 'Menu' button. Look at upper right corner of display.

[Nancy Fulda]

Originally Posted by jgaiser

Ummmm... It does have a clock. Press 'Menu' button. Look at upper right corner of display.

Well, I'll be danged. That is awesome. My kindle has just achieved perfection in my eyes...

[Freeshadow]

wow I mean WOW this thread is a karma eater
I'm in fact really happy to see that so many share the opinion that ebooks should actually be books and not a bunch of web snippets.

Said fears have already been mentioned in discussion about the epub3 draft.

I know it is my favoured stick atm and I'm aware of the fact that some people may start accusing me of trying to beat a horse to death here (yes - typography again) so let my lay it out as brief as I can:

there is a lot of tweaks which can (and should) be applied to text in order to increase the comfort of the reading process
A huge ammount of it isn't available in e-readers, because the rendering engines don't support it (regardles of the fonts doing it) or there are no commands to do so.

ATM the biggest bonus of ebooks is weight and volume. The tech to do more is present, but ignored.
Instead of looking "how web does it" all this improvement-willing ones should IMO look "how (and what) TeX does it"

Before trying to make ebooks better than pbooks there should be more effort put into making them as good as in every way, not only the aforementioned weight and volume.
Making them better is logically the step after that.

[Cyberman tM]

Originally Posted by jgaiser

Umm.. Do we really *need* innovative ebooks? I think you would find that most of us here just want to read. I really don't need more distractions.

Why would one exclude the other?

I'm sure at one time pictures have been innovation too.
Any new "feature" could abused or misused. That doesn't mean it's inherently bad.

Of course, as with all this stuff, there must be an easy way to disable it, so it can be the users choice how to experience the message.

There are many things I wished modern books could do - optional in-depth explanation inside technical books for example. Or a built-in glossary where I can look up words used in that book.
Printed books are - by definition - dead. They cannot change. They need to display all they have because they can't hide it.
Electronic books could, though.

Or indeed sound and video. Why does it HAVE to distract? If an author wants to make sure you can feel the atmosphere, he might add a soundclip with the music currently playing the bar where the characters are at.
Video could be used - in technical books especially - to better explain something.

Yes, it would be like a website. So? Websites aren't made up of HYPER text for nothing.

If all you want is a 1:1 copy of physical books, then perhaps your eBook should be made of bound single pages of e-Ink, so you can turn pages and all that. You needn't refresh the display either, or only once in a while.

Personally, I think it's time for (e)Books to evolve. We came from stone tablets to bound paper. Now we're going digital. Perhaps we should embrace that, instead of rejecting it.

eBooks are a new medium. It should be allowed to evolve, not forced to remain a simple copy of it's predecessor.
Did you know that DVDs had a neat feature that would have allowed multiple angles to be stored on the disc? You could have viewed a scene from different positions, something that was prohibitive on the older tape media.
Didn't take off, though. I wonder if it is because people thought "Ah, it's video, I don't need multiple angles, VHS didn't have it, so why should DVD have it?".
(Or the reasoning was "What good is it? In a movie there is only one angle I want. Never mind sports games or live music or somesuch".?)

[Penforhire]

I've got nothing against a good multimedia experience or even just good hyperlinking. I don't see how the loss of an innovative publisher is much of a blow to progress. Since at least the days of CD's, the issue is content creation not how to publish it.

It is hard enough to create a good book or other written work. Adding other media or links that add value to the work only adds to its difficulty. More power to those who can do it but there would not be some flood of talent if "innovative" e-publishers became common. We'd just have a flood of crappy multimedia works.

[Salgueiros]

What is an innovative ebook?

I do think that a ebook with sound, videos, etc, will not be a ebook, will be something else. I have nothing against the creation of a new type of media, but i disagree that people who read books and ebooks need a new type of "thing". Text is rich enough to provide fabulous experiences to people who are capable and enjoy that mode of transmission, and i quite often find that adding extras deviates effort from attaining good quality texts and create a hybrid where text is so-so in the add-ins do not provide anything really valuable. It is like trading a paper Britannica for a digital early edition of Encarta... my goodness that thing was awful... too many multimedia that added nothing and too little substance.

Besides, reading is a fabulous immersive activity that is killed with too many distractions. I never feel the book i am reading (in case it is a novel) or think properly about the reasoning (if i am reading a philosophy essay) if i don't let my brain "breathe" and too many buttons, or videos or sounds make it impossible to attain that bare psychological landscape where the written words ressonate optimally.

Of course technical books are different, for example seeing 3-D molecular structures in a 2-D screen is frequently complicated, and video (or a hologram, who knows?) could improve the learning value of the ebook.

[Freeshadow]

If all you want is a 1:1 copy of physical books, then perhaps your eBook should be made of bound single pages of e-Ink, so you can turn pages and all that. You needn't refresh the display either, or only once in a while.

I have admitted that weight and volume is an ebook pro
As for your soundtrack idea - If a writer needs such a thing to suck the reader in to his story - he shouldn't write books, but moviescripts.
If I want a movie I go and get myself one. If I want a book...

A book is still something for reading.
Therefor main dev focus of ebooks should be put on reading experience.
It isn't as if god know what on changes would be required:

• usage of hyphenation dictionaries (as TeX does)
• A font rendering engine (support what the fonts offer!; whitspace recog in images used for text placement) which deserves this name, instead of a web rendering ripoff
• less than 10 commands implemented in the epub-spec, adressing said issues, like the ability to choose glyph alternatives (eg monospaced numbers for tables, lowered ones for text (instead of implementing Javascript )

Et voilà what i've spoken about would have been already accomplished.
With current hardware.

When reinventing the wheel 1st make sure it is round before thinking about pneus

[Giggleton]

Facebook redesigned as user generated lifebook?? I would like to be able to share "fictional" narratives as well, although what is fiction??

I'm not sure the innovation is going to come in the content delivery system, unless you imagine the end of the marketplace and the free distribution of all texts as the only delivery system worth talking about, if you are talking about the future enlightenment of the species...

What else shall we talk about??

[carld]

Another vote for text with minimal embellishment please. I don't want to have a multimedia experience when I read, I want to read.

[DiapDealer]

We'll never have innovative ebooks because there's just not much of a demand for innovative ebooks. "Just the text ma'am."

[elcreative]

Perhaps Cyberman tM should notice that much of the posting on the forum relates to reading for entertainment and relaxation, none of which needs multimedia junk to mess with the experience... multimedia entertainment is usually called film/video or works across the web... I've got things for that - computers, tablets and a smartphone - I don't read for entertainment on those, that's why I have an eReader. For tech books, manuals, teaching etc then fine, extras and enhance and add to the process but that's not reading for relaxation and entertainment, it's reading for educational and helpful things and, guess what, I don't use my eReader for those, I use a tablet, a computer and, if out and about, a smartphone...

It is rather insulting to talk of "bound pages of e-ink" and rejecting digital when you are writing for a group of people that, overall, probably embrace more leading tech than most... early adopters of eReaders, tablets etc. It's just most of us embrace eReaders for the convenience and ease of having books to read anywhere and everywhere for our entertainment and and escapism but prefer other tools for the "multimedia" book experience.

[charleski]

Behind all this talk of 'innovative ebooks' there's a secret agenda that dares not speak its name (at least not where the consumers can hear).

It's called ... monetisation.

People are absolutely right in saying that the web already offers us the tools to do pretty much anything we might desire with multimedia, and will continue to advance at a faster pace than any offshoot format. But the problem with the web is that it's hard to get people to pay for it. When people talk about 'innovation' in ebooks they're often really talking about ways in which they can package the web into a different container, one which customers might be willing to buy.

The sad fact is that this has almost nothing to do with actual books, which people have been buying for centuries, and continue to buy in electronic form. It's about rescuing the magazine market, whose disposable content has been decimated by the web.

[Freeshadow]

Originally Posted by elcreative

It is rather insulting to talk of "bound pages of e-ink" and rejecting digital when you are writing for a group of people that, overall, probably embrace more leading tech than most... early adopters of eReaders, tablets etc. It's just most of us embrace eReaders for the convenience and ease of having books to read anywhere and everywhere for our entertainment and and escapism but prefer other tools for the "multimedia" book experience.

Karma on the way

@charleski
I start thinking I actually need a maKro for your postings.
+1 on the whole post from me

[patrickt]

For me there are books to be read and multi-media to be experienced. They aren't the same thing. A book isn't a video or a computer game. That's not to say, with textbooks for example, there isn't a place for innovative multimedia productions. They just aren't books. They might be required as the schools quit teaching children to read, though.