I just had a conversation about this last friday with a coworker. We both basically came to the conclusion that the only e-books that work are prose-oriented, not learning-oriented.

With your average novel, you only read from beginning to end, and you only read words. With a textbook, you not only read words, but you read diagrams and figures. You also skip around...you follow footnotes, references, and you also might follow a curricula that was not defined by the author. You will often refer to two or three different hotspots while studying a single chapter...for example, while working on practice problems, you will flip back and forth between the practice problems, the chapter intro, the context for that problem, and possibly a chapter recap.

This user-adoption gap is not one of the underlying medium, but rather of the user interface. Flipping pages one at a time is not sufficient.

I agree, if by "eBook" we mean only the specific formats (ePub, PDF, mobi). But I'd argue that you can have all if you make a website instead, and read it on a browser. You can then have multiple tabs, bookmarks, large pages with fast scrolling, etc.

And an epub is just a collection of HTML files anyway, so it shouldn't be difficult to make a website instead. I think what's missing is a "website archive format" supported by all major browsers, so the user can have an offline copy of the "book".

> And an epub is just a collection of HTML files anyway, so it shouldn't be difficult to make a website instead. I think what's missing is a "website archive format" supported by all major browsers, so the user can have an offline copy of the "book".

Seems to me that, since an ePub is just a collection of HTML files (well, there's more than that -- there's also an index file, at least, IIRC), the solution is that browsers should be enhanced to read ePub directly. You've already got the "website archive format", you just lack the browser support.