Printed books can be uneven but they're also fairly limited in what they can present.
Your basic concept is a page full of type. I actually care a lot about footnotes or endnotes (I read a lot of nonfiction), indices, and bibliographies. Books lacking in any or all of these get strong demerits.
It's virtually impossible (and very expensive) for books to present distractions. Static black-and-white or color images are about the limit, pop-ups or fold-outs are possible, and as a novelty, perhaps an electronic gizmo pasted to a page or cover, though I cannot think of a single published book I've got which has such. Some technical books that came with CDROMs, but that's almost a completely passed phase now.
There are aspects which speak to age and printing technology -- the slightly blurred type of most pre-1950s 20th century books, and increasing sharpness of type and copy since (starting up-market). Typeface, though modern and sans-serif faces pretty much always annoy me. Large-print books for seniors. Different styles -- picture, comic, and children's books with lots of illustrations. College and high-school textbooks, increasingly almost useless with their call-outs, images, and other visual gimicks. Flashy, yes, but not all that informative.
Or look at Harry Potter and the animated magic newspapers. If I were to run into that I'd scream -- looks fun for a second on a movie screen. Rage-inducing in real life.
Your eBook suggestion is possible. It's really easy to overdo, and a little bit goes a long way. You're also limited by technology, and would likely find that you're getting noise at two levels -- the pseudo-analog noise (see LaTeX's coffee stain macro: http://hanno-rein.de/archives/349http://texblog.org/tag/coffee-stain/), plus accumulated digital noise -- bad pixels or damaged e-ink.
Websites which use background images under text virtually always get it removed by me locally using a personal stylesheet manager.
I read both ebooks and scanned pdf files on my Kindle. Interestingly, I've grown to prefer the scanned pdf files, because of the imperfections, not in spite of them.
Note that most people scan at 300 dpi, that doesn't look good, and is uncomfortable to read. 400dpi is much better.
Your basic concept is a page full of type. I actually care a lot about footnotes or endnotes (I read a lot of nonfiction), indices, and bibliographies. Books lacking in any or all of these get strong demerits.
It's virtually impossible (and very expensive) for books to present distractions. Static black-and-white or color images are about the limit, pop-ups or fold-outs are possible, and as a novelty, perhaps an electronic gizmo pasted to a page or cover, though I cannot think of a single published book I've got which has such. Some technical books that came with CDROMs, but that's almost a completely passed phase now.
There are aspects which speak to age and printing technology -- the slightly blurred type of most pre-1950s 20th century books, and increasing sharpness of type and copy since (starting up-market). Typeface, though modern and sans-serif faces pretty much always annoy me. Large-print books for seniors. Different styles -- picture, comic, and children's books with lots of illustrations. College and high-school textbooks, increasingly almost useless with their call-outs, images, and other visual gimicks. Flashy, yes, but not all that informative.
Or look at Harry Potter and the animated magic newspapers. If I were to run into that I'd scream -- looks fun for a second on a movie screen. Rage-inducing in real life.
Your eBook suggestion is possible. It's really easy to overdo, and a little bit goes a long way. You're also limited by technology, and would likely find that you're getting noise at two levels -- the pseudo-analog noise (see LaTeX's coffee stain macro: http://hanno-rein.de/archives/349 http://texblog.org/tag/coffee-stain/), plus accumulated digital noise -- bad pixels or damaged e-ink.
Websites which use background images under text virtually always get it removed by me locally using a personal stylesheet manager.