From Publishers Weekly, a VERY important interview with entrepreneur Jared Friedman, of the "social publisher" Scribd, concerning HTML5, the soon-to-emerge game-changing update for the Web's lingua franca.
Betting the House on HTML5: "Simply put, because the new features in HTML5 mean that e-books and digital reading can now enjoy all the advantages of the Web. So far, digital reading formats have forced readers to choose between an impoverished Web experience or a frustrating patchwork of proprietary formats and applications tied to specific devices. But with HTML5, we can now display written works digitally in a way that is enjoyable to read, that retains the distinctive appearance of a work's original design, and that takes advantage of everything the Web and our mobile devices can offer us. With HTML5, book pages can literally become Web pages as opposed to images encased in a locked-down, artificial frame inside a browser, preserving complex designs unique to documents, books, or magazines, from fonts to images, vector graphics, rotated text, precise positioning. Maybe most importantly, HTML5 e-books are universally accessible. That means publishers get access to the largest audience possible, because HTML is an open standard, supported anywhere. If you convert your content to HTML5, almost any device can read it."
