Margaret -
Has your venture into e-book self-publishing been via Smashwords, by any chance? The stuff about hyperlinked index and formatting sounds familiar.
I like your positive attitude towards e-books, and I agree with you: I think they probably are the future. On the other hand, of course, there are all these stupid compatibility issues. Epub is the best format, but Kindle doesn't like it. Colour is one of the big advantages of e-publishing, but Kindle doesn't do colour. Page layout is really tricky because there are so many different-sized readers. Even things like hyperlinks and rollovers... a lot of e-readers (like the crappy one I got from Waterstones, purely because someone gave me a load of Waterstones tokens) don't have touch-screen, which means you can't click a link or activate a rollover.
I think a lot of these compatibility issues will probably disappear within the next couple of years: I don't think non-touch-screen e-readers are going to be around much longer, for example; and I'm sure Kindle will want to add colour as soon as they can do it at a reasonable price and without compromising their much-vaunted text quality. We may then find ourselves in a very interesting place, because with zero storage and distribution costs minority-interest publishing will be a really good opportunity for anybody who fancies giving it a go.
- Edward
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