Why in the near future it will not be possible to work with e-books in the same way as with paper

    Attention! The topic is not about the "read and forget" style and not about reading with the aim of killing time!

    Ebooks are dead. Rather, everything related to active work with them. This is the main problem raised in a recent topic . It excites everyone.

    Many do not think of a productive reading of a book without shoving heaps of bookmarks into it, bending corners of pages, emphasizing the important and striking out the unimportant, commenting on the margins and on the stickers.

    “Yes, this is implemented in two accounts in software!”


    ... cry out any, even a novice programmer. It is realized, but there are a number of factors that oppose the accession of paradise on earth. It:
    • copywriting
    • closeness
    • fight with competitors

    I will explain in more detail. What is the difference between e-books and paper? Think it over.


    A single open format!


    The presentation of the paper book is the same: almost all books are printed on paper and stacked. You choose how to store your library, on a shelf or something else. You come up with a single directory for your library, it is in one place (notepad) and describes your books in a single way. You develop a single approach to working with books and follow it. Naturally, you can not invent everything yourself, but copy the approach from someone.

    In e-books the opposite is true


    The books themselves are a zoo of formats, I don’t even want to talk about it. FB2 in the Russian community, mossy PDF and the new EPUB - in English, all sorts of proprietary slag, such as Amazonian AZW ... It’s the same as if each publisher began to print books on different materials: these on paper, these on metal sheets, and these - and at all on balls, as this is good for branding.

    Each bookseller invents his own design of the “bookshelf” and the system for categorizing books in it, both of which are usually proprietary. In fact, this is not a sale of books, but their reading in the library. The guys at Bookmate were the most honest in this regard.

    There is almost nothing to say about the system of working with a book - they are either scarce or none at all. The book is not yours - it belongs to the library!

    There is only one way out


    Rather, there are two of them, but in one battle it was already lost - to make a complete analogue of the book, that is, to let it read wherever you want and what you want. Such books are “photocopied” by pirates with a bang, that’s why for so many years we have not seen a single decent and legal electronic bookstore.

    The second way is to take and agree. And this is the most difficult thing for businessmen! Agree on the exchange of information, negotiate with third-party services for the provision of API. So that anyone can make tools for working with books. So that quotes can be stored in one place. That the graph of interests was uniform.

    Kindle has a terribly cool thing: right on the pages of the book you see pieces that a large number of people added to the quotes. A massive mind helps not miss important ideas. But is this service useful if the market is divided between two more booksellers whose readers do not use this tool, and you can’t look at the quote anywhere except for a special program or share it with friends?

    Update


    Surprisingly, many habrayuzers do not know what the leaders of the electronic book trade are (I am not talking about pirates and small traders). The fact is that their books can be read in one single way: using their platform, which consists of a local client program that downloads purchases from a web service and stores them in its own closed format. Moreover, the format of the book itself does not matter at all - you cannot open it in another program or do something else. Such platforms are discussed in the note.

    Update 2


    Habratovarisch yupic wrote a constructive post on this subject. I advise !

    Also popular now: