Attention! The topic is not about the “read and forget” style and not about reading in order to kill time!

Ebooks are dead. Rather, everything that concerns the active work with them. This is the main problem raised in a recent topic . It worries everyone.

Many people do not think of a productive reading of a book without stuffing a pile of bookmarks into it, bending the corners of the pages, emphasizing the important and crossing out the unimportant, commenting on the margins and on the stickers.
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“Yes, this is implemented in software in two accounts!”

... anyone, even a novice programmer, will scream. Being realized is realized, but there are a number of factors opposing the accession of paradise on earth. It:

• copywriting
• closeness
• struggle with competitors

I will explain in more detail. What is the difference between e-books and paper books? Think about it.

Single open format!

The paper book presentation is one: almost all books are printed on paper and piled up. You choose how to store your library, on a shelf or something else. You come up with a single catalog of your library, it is in one place (notepad) and describes your books in the same way. You develop a single approach to working with books and follow it. Naturally, you can not invent everything yourself, but copy the approach from someone.

In electronic books, the opposite is true.

The books themselves are a zoo of formats, I don’t even want to talk about it. FB2 in the Russian community, the mossy PDF and the new EPUB - in English, every kind of proprietary slag, such as Amazon's AZW ... It’s as if every publisher started to print books on different materials: these are on paper, these are on metal sheets, and these - and at all on the balls, as it is good for branding.

Each bookseller invents his own “bookshelf” design and the system for categorizing books in it, both of which are usually proprietary. In fact, this is not selling books, but reading them in the library. The guys from Bookmate were the most honest in this regard.

There is almost nothing to say about the system of working with a book - they are either scarce or not at all. The book is not yours - it belongs to the library!

There is only one way out of the situation.

Rather, there are two of them, but in one battle it has already been lost - to make a complete analogue of the book, that is, to give it to read where you want and what you want. Such books are “photocopied” with pirates with a bang, which is why for so many years we have not seen a single decent and legal electronic book store.

The second way is to take and agree. And this is the most difficult thing for merchants! Agree on the exchange of information, agree with third-party services to provide API. So that any person can make tools for working with books. So that quotes can be stored in one place. To graph of interests was one.

Kindle has a terribly cool thing: right on the pages of the book, you see pieces that a large number of people have added to the quotes. Mass reason helps to not miss important ideas. But is this service useful if the market is divided between two other booksellers whose readers do not use this tool, and you cannot look at the quote somewhere except for a special program or share it with friends?

Update

Surprisingly, many habrayusers do not know what the leaders of the trade in electronic books are of themselves (I don’t say anything about pirates and small traders). The fact is that their books can be read in one and only one way: using their platform consisting of a local client program that downloads purchases from a web service and stores them in its own, proprietary format. At the same time, the format of the book itself does not matter at all - you cannot open it in another program or do something else. On such platforms, and is discussed in the article.

Update 2

Hubratovarisch yupic wrote a constructive post on this topic. I advise !