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.”
2010 > FROM THE LIBRIÉ TO THE IPAD
[Summary] After a quiet time in the early 2000s, ebook readers “took off” again, from the Librié launched by Sony in April 2004 to the iPad launched by Apple in April 2010. The first dedicated ebook readers were the Rocket eBook (1998), the SoftBook Reader (1998) and the Gemstar eBook (November 2000), which didn’t last long. Lighter ebook readers storing more books showed up with new E Ink displays, for exemple Librié from Sony (April 2004), Cybook 2nd generation (June 2004), Sony Reader (September 2006), Kindle from Amazon (November 2007), and Nook from Barnes & Noble (November 2009). Competition has been fierce with smartphones (from 2005) and with the iPad from Apple (April 2010). Some readers are now eager to read multimedia/hypermedia content and stories in 3D on flexible devices.
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After a quiet time in the early 2000s, ebook readers “took off” again, from the Librié launched by Sony in April 2004 to the iPad launched by Apple in April 2010.
The first dedicated ebook readers were the Rocket eBook (1998), the SoftBook Reader (1998) and the Gemstar eBook (November 2000), which didn’t last long. Lighter ebook readers storing more books showed up with new E Ink displays, for example the Librié from Sony (April 2004), the Cybook 2nd generation (June 2004), the Sony Reader (September 2006), the Kindle from Amazon (November 2007), and the Nook from Barnes & Noble (November 2009). Competition has been fierce with smartphones (from 2005) and with the iPad from Apple (April 2010).
# The Librié (Sony)