Pref­ace

We started explor­ing the emerg­ing world of dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing since the pre-release of the Adobe DPS in April 2011. This was and actu­ally is one of our main field of inter­est so for the next 6 months until today we keep search­ing and test­ing all the dif­fer­ent tools and involved tech­nolo­gies that come up.
Now, we would like to pub­lish a sum up of our expe­ri­ence to stim­u­late fur­ther ideas and thoughts.

Assump­tion

To build a con­cise and use­ful review we had to make a main assump­tion defin­ing** e-book ver­sus inter­ac­tive book / dig­i­tal magazine**:

• With the term e-book we grouped all the known tech­nolo­gies that belong to the basic need of read­ing, lim­ited in design and inter­ac­tive capabilities.
• With the terms inter­ac­tive book and dig­i­tal mag­a­zine we grouped all the tech­nolo­gies and related tools which aims to pro­duce high-interactive, graph­i­cally rich publications.

We don’t want to go into a deep analy­sis of the var­i­ous e-book for­mats since there is plenty of resources cov­er­ing this topic. How­ever as a start­ing point for an over­all list and com­par­i­son of the e-book for­mats we sug­gest the excel­lent wikipedia entry:

http://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​w​i​k​i​/​C​o​m​p​a​r​i​s​o​n​_​o​f​_​e​-​b​o​o​k​_​f​o​r​m​ats