Pocket PC eBooks Watch - eBook and beyond  
 http://cebooks.blogspot.com 

That Was Then, This is Now dept.
The Ghost of eBook Past
How a trip to the mall on a December night became a personal journey into e-publishing's not-so-distant past
...Nonetheless, I did enjoy flipping through Orpheus Emerged (bizarre déjà vu though it was at times), and detailed comparisons to a certain Kerouac e-book of yore wouldn't be fair. A Jack Kerouac ROMnibus cost a half-million dollars to make and sold for $50 a copy. Orpheus Emerged is a much more limited endeavor, and is quite fairly priced at $3.95. I recommend it (in the Adobe Acrobat eBook version).
...Most readers never saw the electronic books of the 1990s. That's because serious, well-produced CD-ROMs were too far ahead of their time—too far ahead of the software, the hardware, the digital economy itself. The general public may well believe "e-book" to be a brand-new, twenty-first-century idea. And indeed, for most of the potential audience, Orpheus Emerged will feel fresh and new and intriguing. If publishers embrace the new possibilities of "converging media" and accept the realities—that ground needs to be broken, that good production is expensive, that it won't be instantly profitable, that a slew of boring, overpriced titles will alienate the public—then electronic-multimedia books could indeed become the future of reading, or part of it. Just like they used to be.

posted by Jerry permanent link