People have been talking about e-books and e-publishing for a long time, but reading books on electronic devices has only recently become a popular activity. With the rising popularity of Amazon’s Kindle and now Apple’s iBooks, it seems that all you hear about these days are “e-books.” Of course, we’ve been publishing books of various kinds in electronic format for more than fifteen years, yet you rarely hear us talk about “e-books.” That’s because we think more about the “e” than the “book.” In other words, we’re more interested in leveraging the capabilities of electronic access so that you can experience those books in ways never before possible.
The problem with e-books is that they’re still largely bound by the conventions of print books. You may be able to customize an e-book’s appearance somewhat or interact with it in limited ways, but essentially, you’re dealing with a book delivered electronically. You still interact with it like a bound copy of a print book, except that you’re reading on a screen rather than a leaf of paper. Accordance is designed so you can tear the binding off of all those “books,” fully interact with the information they contain, and manipulate that information in unprecedented ways. In the next several posts, I’ll show you how.