[Summary]
Marc Autret, a journalist and graphic designer, wrote in December 2006:
"I am convinced that the ebook has a great future in all non-fiction
sectors. I refer to the ebook as a software and not as a dedicated
physical medium (the conjecture is more uncertain on this point). (…)
Non-commercial ebooks are already emerging everywhere while opening the
way to new developments. To my eyes, there are at least two emerging
trends: (a) an increasingly attractive and functional interface for
reading/consultation (navigation, research, restructuring on the fly,
user annotations, interactive quiz); (b) a multimedia integration
(video, sound, animated graphics, database) now strongly coupled to the
web. No physical book offers such features. So I imagine the ebook of
the future as a kind of wiki crystallized and packaged in a given
format. How valuable will it be? Its value will be the one of a book:
the unity and quality of editorial work!"
***
In late 2006, I launched an inquiry about how people were seeing the
future of ebooks. Here are the answers from Pierre Schweitzer, Denis
Zwirn and Marc Autret, three French “pioneers” in their own fields.
Pierre Schweitzer is the inventor of the @folio project, a mobile
device for texts. He wrote in December 2006: "The luck we all have is
to live this fantastic change here and now. When I was born in 1963, a
computer memory could only hold a few pages of characters. Today, my
music player could hold billions of pages, a true local library.
Tomorrow, by the combined effect of the Moore Law and the ubiquity of
networks, we will have instant access to works and knowledge. We won't
be much interested any more on which device to store information. We
will be interested in handy functions and beautiful objects."
Denis Zwirn is the founder of Numilog, the main French-language digital
bookstore. He wrote in August 2007: "The digital book is not any more a
topic for symposiums, conceptual definitions, or divination by some
'experts'. It is a commercial product and a tool for reading. There is
no need to wait for some new hypermodern and hypertextual tool
carefully orchestrating its specificity from the print book. We need to
offer books that can be easily read on any electronic device used by
customers, sooner or later with an electronic ink display. And to offer
them as an industry. The digital book is not, and will never be, a
niche product (dictionaries, travel guides, books for the blind). It is
becoming a mass market product, with multiple forms, like the
traditional book."
After being a journalist specialized in publishing, multimedia and
copyright, Marc Autret is a graphic designer working with publishers.
He wrote in December 2006: "I am convinced that the ebook has a great
future in all non-fiction sectors. I refer to the ebook as a software
and not as a dedicated physical medium (the conjecture is more
uncertain on this point). The [European] publishers of guides,
encyclopedias and informative books in general still see the ebook as a
very minor variation of the printed book, probably because the business
model and secure management don't seem entirely stabilized. But this is
a matter of time. Non-commercial ebooks are already emerging everywhere
while opening the way to new developments.
To my eyes, there are at least two emerging trends: (a) an increasingly
attractive and functional interface for reading/consultation
(navigation, searching, restructuring on the fly, annotations of the
user, interactive quiz); (b) a multimedia integration (video, sound,
animated graphics, database) now strongly coupled to the web. No
physical book offers such features. So I imagine the ebook of the
future as a kind of wiki crystallized and packaged in a given format.
How valuable will it be? Its value will be the one of a book: the unity
and quality of editorial work!"
Marc was not happy about the “competition” between PDF and EPUB. He
added in June 2011: “I do regret that the emergence of EPUB has led to
the outright annihilation of PDF as a format for digital books. The
fact that interactivity elements available within the PDF are not
supported by the current mobile platforms has removed any possibility
of experimenting new things in this direction, that had seemed very
promising to me. While print publishing gives place to many different
objects, ranging from the carefully designed art book to the basic book
for everyday reading, the ebook market has grown from the start on a
totalitarian and segregationist mode, comparable to a war between
operating systems, rather than favoring a technical and cultural
emulation. Because of this, there are few PDF digital books benefiting
from the opportunities given by this format.
In the unconscious collective mind, PDF has stayed a kind of static
duplicate of the print book, and nobody wants to see any other fate for
him. The EPUB format, which is nothing but a combination of XHTML/CSS
(admittedly with JavaScript prospects), consists in putting the digital
book 'in phase with' the web. This is a technology that has favored
structured content, but hasn’t favored typographic craft at all. It has
given a narrow vision of the digital work, reducing it to a flow of
information. We don’t measure it yet, but the worst cultural disaster
in recent decades has been the advent of XML, as a language that pre-
calibrates and contaminates the way we think our hierarchies. XML and
its avatars go on locking us in the cultural invariants of the Western
world.”