E-books are not books

Abstract

Currently, in the early days of their development, e-books are essentially following the evolutionary path of physical books, a path that started thousands of years ago. Yet physical books are containers for a wide variety of information types, and are accessed in a wide variety of ways, which offers the possibility of differing electronic manifestations. The evolutionary approach will continue to be reasonably successful in meeting current needs, but the real growth in the adoption of e-books will happen when the traditional book is deconstructed and reconstructed (textually, behaviorally and commercially) in order to create new paradigms for storing and delivering content in electronic forms. Copyright 2008 ACM.