E-books, why so old-fashioned? Here's a Web wakeup call - CNET

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For all the supposed disruption that e-books brought to the publishing industry, the digital versions look still look an awful lot like the paper ones you could have bought a century ago.

Nighttime orange text to avoid sleep disturbance is nice, but digital text on a tablet is basically the same as ink text on paper. Comic books and graphic novels go a bit farther. Still, most e-books fall far short of the creativity shown in paper with the "Little Lamb" finger puppet book or Maurice Sendak's "Mommy?" pop-up book.

E-books could become much more dynamic and interactive, though. That's because two groups -- the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Inteational Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) are trying to join forces. The first advances and standardizes the technology underpinning the Web; the second the Epub format used to package e-books. In a statement Tuesday, Web creator and W3C leader Tim Beers-Lee said the planned merger would "create a rich media environment for digital publishing."

The current Epub 3.0 standard already uses Web technologies, but e-books remain a separate domain from the Web. The new Portable Web Publications effort would erase the distinction. That would make it easier to publish a single Web document that's conveniently separated into multiple chapters, lets you flip from page to page, and better handles math formulas in textbooks.