I never did post my thoughts on eBooks, but I sure did write a lot of words about them. Maybe I'll figure out how to digest those words into something more manageable later.
In any rate, I continue to think about what really makes an eBook different from, say, a web page or even a site. They're linear, sure, but the current environment makes so many more things matter, simply because of the display technology.
Though it occurs to me, the same thing happened with the mobile web. It used to be that mobile web browsers were very limited, had little to no javascript or css support, came with many varying but always tiny resolutions. Eventually, the technology got to the point where that no longer mattered. Phones became full-fledged computers with full browsers. Screen size issues were solved by real-time scaling. Nowadays, it's almost always annoying when a website detects you're on a mobile device and shows you a stripped-down version of the website.
We're probably only a generation or two of readers away from the same thing happening in the eBook space. Unfortunately, we're waiting on both display and battery technology to catch up to our ambitions. And that still doesn't answer the question of what an eBook format should be like.
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