Lilypond and ePub

[Nils]

Hello list,

(this is just chatting and dreaming. If you don't want to waste your time with 
thinking about the future, don't read on, there is no practical information in 
here.)

Today I bought my first eBook reader, the kobo touch. I chose this because it 
is rather cheap and is not a closed ecosystem regarding up- and downloads as 
well as file formats.

I tried pdf and epub books now and it is clear that epdf is not a good format 
for this device. I suspect the same for other readers which are not A4 size or 
bigger.

ePub on the other hand scales well to different display sizes. You can choose 
the font, size etc. Obviously the human layouter has no fine control over line- 
and pagebreaks here anymore (except forced ones like chapter breaks). Well, 
maybe this is just the future, I don't see a problem with that, at least not 
for text.

Now I'm thinking about music notation on such a device. Obviously they are not 
made for performance, which is fine. The page turn is a bit slow (but so is a 
paper pageturn) and the screens are too small for music. But practical 
solutions are just around the corner for these (using two linked devices for 
example, or one that has two screens, where one page is turned when you play on 
the other).

Anyway, there are more use cases for music notation than piano performance or 
conductors. Songbooks don't require much space and even in real life they have 
approx. the same measurements. Or music theory books, you only need snippets 
here.

But the different display size remains. You need scaling and dynamic line and 
pagebreaks here.

Lilypond-Book came to my mind where the pagebreak gets dynamic through each 
music-line/system becomes one vector image. You get no/ugly system spacing, but 
at least dynamic page breaks. 

The line-break on the other hand is more problematic, although in principle it 
could be solved in the same manner as page-breaking. This would be a revival of 
moveable types, the system is divided in columns and they are technically 
independent as well, so you get dynamic linebreaks.
Maybe not the most beautiful way, but quick and practical, which are in fact 
the same reasons it was used from the year 1501 onward.

Any thoughts on this topic? I immediately found this relevant to my interest, 
once I saw the staticness and resulting uglyness of PDF compared to the 
elegance of ePub (for text). I can not imagine music notation as pdf here.

Nils