On a recent TV review on NDTV India, Virkam Chandra and his colleague commented that the Safari Browser in the iPhone was implemented in a revolutionary manner with pinch zooming and crisp rendition. They however felt that the lack of copy paste was a serious ommision- perhaps a lapse on Apple's part.
Well folks, as it turns out most webpages are as such copyrighted material and owned by the site creator or licensed from another source. Not having copy-paste should have been a natural implementation on the early web days- to encourage more serious econtent which is not dependent on ads or sponsors. Then ebooks publishers and independent authors can consider the web as a serious medium for content and charge even nominal fees- per view/reading or annual subscription.
(The fact that a travel publisher such as Lonely Planet still prefers to look at the print medium - even though loads of books and tons of text have to be re-printed every other year for each destination, is an indicator that content sharing failed on the web. Lonely Planet should have benefited immensely from the web in the past decade- in theory - since they are a text based publisher with emphasis on little details or simple maps for every other area of a town. A hypelink and search approach should have enabled them to focus on their job of creating guides rather than estimating stock to print. But so far content can be lifted off from webpages, even after initial payment. So neither the publisher is interested in serious content creation, nor do readers get reliable e-content at affordable prices)
I have not yet put my hands on an iPhone but I hope this paves the way for e-books and audio books. Those who wish to publish free info can then find a way to release the data and allow download or copy-paste.
The iPhone is doing many things right, which the net could not earlier on. This product promises to be a content-platform for sure, hopefully.
Saumil,
Mumbai
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