Can E-book be ever 3-Dimensional?
Can E-book be ever 3-Dimensional?
Print advocates, nostalgics & traditionalists often criticise E-book as lacking the 3rd Dimensionality like even your smartphone has had. You can hold your smartphone, place it on your body, open it for maintenance, etc. But the E-book remains 'Intangible'. It doesn't feel like a good, a product at all?
It looks like every FREE info webpage in the very essence. And we know, from the very date of birth of the Internet, people are accustomed to obtaining info for Free (practically) whenever the medium is the World Wide Web. Of course your cyber cafe, say in India @ 2001 AD, may have billed you Rs. 50/- per hour. But compare this money with the amount of info you downloaded in your Floppy disk. These coloured photos, text messages, Articles, Reports, Interviews, etc could have otherwise been obtained only through buying costly magazines, costly books, costly photo-selling shops, etc. Moreover, we soon observed that this competitive rate at Cyber Cafe even dropped further within a few years to Rs. 15 or even Rs. 10. What does this indicate? The Producer of the Content doesn't earn money from you.
In fact, it was a FREE ride in the Internet. Giving out Contents for FREE (in most cases) in the Internet. The Producer neither earns money from any 3rd party usually too. So where does this 'little' money go? To the Tech companies, or anyone else dealing directly with the 'Tangible' Tech goods — like the physical smartphones, physcial computers, physical infrastructure of the Cyber Cafe including the physical goods of the Chairs there.
So people even today tends to equate the E-book to FREE websites in the Internet i.e. any practically free info. Although people often say that a Book is superior to the Internet.
But coming to a Print-book they feel it has to have a price, unlike the Internet where the overhead cost (e.g. the Cyber Cafe bill) is insignificant. But these days people are often getting the exact same info via the Print-book's full scans available in the Internet. So who buys then even the physical/tangible Print books?!
Now the Research runs how we can make the E-book medium stand out from the general Internet.
