The Great E-Book Debate

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Great E-Book Debate
Another attempt to revive e-books. Nielsen writes, " Xplana Learning has assumed a leadership role in the development of e-books and online learning platforms, and has indeed redefined e-books in order to maximize usability and engagement." Well fine. But here's the thing. If you look at, say, Project Gutenberg, you'll see that we've pretty much solved the problem of putting books online. We can use plain ASCII, we don't need a special player, and it all works pretty well. The thing with e-books, is that they promise to deliver what publishers want, and not so much what readers want. More...