After posting about the panel discussion on the future of the book, I looked up the listing of e-book formats at Wikipedia and found:
- Archos Diffusion
- Broadband eBooks (BBeB)
- Comic Book Archive file
- Compiled HTML
- DAISY – ANSI/NISO Z39.86
- Desktop Author
- DjVu
- EPUB
- eReader
- FictionBook (Fb2)
- Founder Electronics
- Hypertext Markup Language
- iBook (Apple)
- IEC 62448
- KF8 (Amazon Kindle)
- Microsoft LIT
- Mobipocket
- Multimedia eBooks
- Newton eBook
- Open Electronic Package
- Portable Document Format
- Plain text files
- Plucker
- PostScript
- SSReader
- TealDoc
- TEBR
- Text Encoding Initiative
- TomeRaider
Beyond different formats, the additional issue being that each book stands on its own.
Imagine a “hover” over a section of interest in a book and relevant other “sections” from other books are also displayed.
Is anyone working on a mapping across these various formats? (Not conversion, “mapping across” language chosen deliberately. Conversion might violate a EULA. Navigation with due regard to the EULA would be difficult to prohibit.)
I realize some of them are too seldom used for commercially viable material to be of interest. Or may be of interest only in certain markets (SSReader for instance).
Not the classic topic map case of identifying duplicate content in different guises but producing navigation across different formats to distinct material.