CM: eBook or website? Where do we put
content? Do we need ebooks?

AS: One the more interesting projects we
had a chance to work on here is the Learning,

Freedom & the Web that we developed for Mozilla.

Mozilla is known very much as a web entity:
they are the folks behind Firefox and their
whole mission is to support an open web and
to support the technologies, the processes, the
people that make the web such an extraordinary
and vibrant place. So it is very appropriate that
when we looked to create an ebook for a title
they had authored about the future of learning
that we wanted to do that in a way that was as
open as the web that Mozilla advocates for. We
created the title in HTMLs because that is open
standard, it has the ability to run not only on
the iPad but the Android and just about any
tablet, desktop or phone. The irony of that is
that the experience of reading Learning, Freedom
& the Web does feel quite book-like in the sense
that there is a linear order, a table of contents
sort of turned into a navigation bar, but you
would ultimately recognize it as a book. At the
same time, precisely because it was built in

this open way, it works beautifully as a website.
You can access this title on the web and you
wouldn’t necessarily feel that you were missing
something by not reading it on a tablet.

That really points to the convergence of the
web and the ebook, and both the limitations
and the value of ebook as a label. Using the
title of “book” you are framing the expectation
for how people are going to interact with it, and
encouraging them to dig deeper, to engage with
the content. I hope the word ebook will persist,
because I think it speaks to a really important
need in our culture, which is for people to
engage deeply with ideas.

At the end of the day it doesn’t matter whether
people are deeply engaging on a laptop screen
or a tablet screen or a phone: if they are having
that experience of diving into the text or into a
collection of content, they are readers. They are
experiencing a book.