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This is an excellent point. If digital textbooks are sold as alternatives to physical ones, then I’m not interested as they’re the same copies but one is in a more convenient format (for me.) Why aren’t digital features taken advantage of more often? When I first saw iBooks, that got me excited. Sadly that kind of interactive eBooks never really took off.

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I think interactive features aren't used more often because there tends to be significant programming work required to make them. The "explorable explanations" movement has produced amazing works (e.g. http://ncase.me), but there's a lot of custom code involved.

Some aspects of interactivity can be handled by a one-size-fits-all solution (like zoomable charts or embedded video/audio), but I don't think that it will be possible to go much further without involving programmers. And that makes interactive features orders of magnitude more expensive than just a static image, leaving the cool stuff to hobbyists who have the time to make it work.

I know there are specialist JavaScript libraries for this, but I find it hard to believe that there aren’t any WYSIWYG tools that allows you to create layouts and add interactivity such as hotspots and simple animation..

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