English 
Italiano 
Goal reached? The spirit of e-books, that has been animating fairs, debates, fantasies and assumptions since several years, is now taking shape in concrete objects, with a serious chance to enter into common usage.
We are already witnessing a primitive, almost ideological, “standards war” between the iPad and Amazon’s Kindle, about which will likely become the reference device.
Without dwelling too much on the technical differences, it appears however at first sight that the recent Apple product is designed to perform several functions, where the reading has certainly taken on primary importance, but on the other hand it results to be towed by the other multiple uses.
As emphasized by Gino Roncaglia, author of an essay on the electronic book, the iPad found its killer application in reading; on the opposite, when considering dedicated and exclusive use patterns, each accessory is a potentially added value. In this sense, the iPad can be defined as a “bridge product”, in a prospect much broader than the limited distinction between tablet and laptop, smartphone and e-reader, and so on.
Any difficulties concerning construction details, stability of applications and even usability issues, which draw attention on magazines and websites, may be overshadowed.
The real limits are somewhere else: first, there is still no effective yield on the physical characteristics of the object-book, despite the rapid development of touch screens and the electronic ink, that are expected to match the resolutions of press soon.
I’m not referring to eyestrain, or some nostalgia of the page flip, to the weight and the smell of paper, or the pleasure of collections: I mean the surplus outline frame that expand and complete the text. The development of these elements, called “paratext” by experts, does not go hand in hand with the progress of formats: the tools designed to mark and highlight, note and comment the pages, can be further enhanced and made more agreeable, whereas attention for the standard is still only marginal.
Furthermore, the fragility of a technology that has passed the prototype stage only recently has not yet allowed immediate, thoughtless, practical uses, without the constant concern for damage: the cost of the components determines the suitability of any repairs.
Undoubtedly, from an eco-friendly point of view, the e-book has the advantage of saving paper and ink. The issue of sustainability is becoming increasingly serious and it is demonstrated that the Kindle exceeds in benefit the paper editions, but the environmental impact necessarily depends on the amount of texts considered.
Speaking about economies of scale, while the shift to the liquid mode could cut the costs of distribution and simplify its steps, investments in digitization are still expensive under certain volumes and concentrations, or size of organizations.
As for publishers, even newspapers and magazines have already partially transformed their structures to renew the early stages of the production process, but without considering it entirely, and the same consideration applies to archives and libraries.
In any case, moving toward the side of the reader-consumer, the conversion to an e-reader is much easier with high grades of renewal of the contents, due to their obsolescence and decay of the support, or conversely as the more difficult they are to find.
Thus, specialty and educational books, manuals are listed among the most prominent examples and particularly the information, above all, rather than the fiction bestseller.
Even if the structure of the paper support should be maintained to avoid confusion or distortion on forms and habits established by time or functional efficiency, it should be recognized that the potential of media convergence has not been fully explored and exploited.
The richness of hypertext is given by audiovisual integration, by interconnection of bibliographical, critical, semantic indexing: the press has actually made some steps along that way (every newspaper has a web counterpart), but the needs of edition and upgrading involve a challenging effort. The renovation has not yet fully invested the human, intellectual, editorial activity: technology, while continually offering more tools, however, is already well ahead of the content implementation awareness and scopes.
The largest gap to be filled, therefore, is a long process of training, adaptation and reorganization, at present only at its beginning. The task is approximately set, the time available is not lacking, but there is still a long way to go!
