Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "How eBooks Work - Computerphile" video.

  1. 18:43 The book publishers themselves destroyed a lot of the promise of e-books, by trying to impose restrictions on them above and beyond those on physical paper books. And also trying to charge more for them. I can remember all those years of rising paper book prices in the latter 20th century, which the publishers blamed on the rising cost of paper, ink etc. So you don’t think that moving to a purely electronic format, getting rid of those consumables costs, would see a drop in the price. Not a chance.
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  2. 19:49 Correct layout of mathematical equations is a solved problem, surely. Consider that even HTML-based Jupyter notebooks can include correctly-rendered maths formulas, thanks to MathJax.
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  3. I never understood that whole pronunciation preciousness thing. Knuth tried to claim that the “X” (eks) was actually “Χ” (chi), and that the “e” (ee) was actually subscript “Έ” (epsilon), and so on. But the Unix/Linux commands are written “tex” and “latex”, so why continue to pretend they should be pronounced otherwise?
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  4. 15:36 I suppose CSS animation features are right out.
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  5. 16:00 I can’t imagine videos would work on readers with e-ink screens, though.
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