Clint Lalonde offered up a great observation yesterday that I'd like to explore. What are your thoughts? Is the metaphor of book not appropriate for ePublications? Should we be looking for new ways to express the essential features of enriched reading environments?
Clint said: "I was thinking this exact thought with the hoopla with the Apple announcement last week. The whole book paradigm seems like such a holdover from another age - like a transitory metaphor. Kind of like the file folder metaphor on a computer. A digital manifistation of an analouge form that really doesn't apply to a web world. Why do we even need to hold on to this whole notion of a "book"? Is there value in having a "book" other than it gives publishers a way to package content?"
And Scott Leslie agreed with Clint (or was it the other way around?): “I am really interested; my personal take is that "eBooks" are a combination of hangover from an older age and marketing ploy by both booksellers and hardware vendors, and that when you take the covers off it just looks like a bit of the web bundled up so it can sell. But maybe I am really missing something that is special to eBooks and eReaders?”