Universal Ebook Format Debated 277
Amy Hsieh writes "A well-known ebook industry expert, Jon Noring, recently wrote an interesting article for eBookWeb, formally calling upon the ebook industry to adopt a single universal ebook distribution format. Right now there's a plethora of essentially incompatible ebook formats, and this format 'babel' is hampering the growth of the ebook industry. In the article, Mr. Noring proposes a promising open-standards candidate which appears to meet a list of basic requirements: The Open eBook Forum's OEBPS Specification. Andy Oram, a Linux programming editor for O'Reilly, wrote an interesting reply to the article that should also be read." On the other hand, Noring's proposal has also met with some skepticism elsewhere.
Sounds easy to me... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sounds easy to me... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sounds easy to me... (Score:2)
what about HTML? Compressed HTML at that.
Umm... SGML (Score:2)
Re:Sounds easy to me... (Score:2)
I don't think that you are serious about
deliver textual information. But a good book contains more than just
that. The layout, font and style makes reading easy or difficult,
whatever publisher intended. Illustrations and other artwork (eg
formulas) improve accessibility of the delivered information.
A
Except for being a proprietary thing, I consider
variant) a good format for books. It's not perfect, and its outs
Re:Sounds easy to me... (Score:2)
that. The layout, font and style makes reading easy or difficult,
whatever publisher intended. Illustrations and other artwork (eg
formulas) improve accessibility of the delivered information.
Funny.. the last 3 good books I read had none of this...
Text books and manuals? yes.. a good book? nope.
I suggest you go into the fiction and non fiction isles and pick up a few books and learn what is in the bulk of publications... Words... no pretty pictures and charts... b
Re:Sounds easy to me... (Score:3, Insightful)
However, there is certainly an important place for plain text ebooks - they are easy to convert to more complete formats. The efforts of Project Gutenberg aren't wasted.
Re:Sounds easy to me... (Score:4, Insightful)
A standardized rich text format is absolutely required, one which defines document structure so you get all the goodness like chapters, quotations, sidebars, footnotes, images etc., but doesn't impose how it should be laid for the most part, or the layout is specified by an accompanying style sheet.
Something like docbook might be suitable, but some of its more gross or esoteric things would have to be pruned or moved into different levels of support for the sake of simplicity.
Well (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well (Score:3, Funny)
My ebook format (Score:4, Informative)
How about WAP? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is Project Gutenberg and a Palm Pilot.
I would like to put up a server to serve up Gutenberg, etc. a page or so at a time for low-end WAP phones, with simple indexing and serching capabilities. The simpler cell-phone is what I really always have in-hand with good connectivity when I would like to read. Palm Pilots never seem to have enough storage to keep whole books or widespread connectivity.
Ha anyone done this? It should be popular and not too resource-intensive.
Re:How about WAP? (Score:2)
Palm Pilots never seem to have enough storage to keep whole books
I meant to keep lots of whole books.
Re:How about WAP? (Score:2)
Re:How about WAP? (Score:2, Interesting)
www.wapnovel.com (Score:4, Interesting)
Expro: I would like to put up a server to serve up Gutenberg, etc. a page or so at a time for low-end WAP phones
I got bored last Christmas and did this.
www.wapnovel.com [wapnovel.com] (WAP or desktop)
There's also an as yet unused discussion group at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wapnovel [yahoo.com]
Better readers needed (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's hoping that all [sciam.com] those [parc.com] e-paper [eink.com] efforts [papyron.com] will produce something usable soon.
Re:Better readers needed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Better readers needed (Score:2)
Re:Better readers needed (Score:2)
I don't like running multiple copies, either. Personally, I prefer MS Reader on my Pocket PC because Adobe eBook Reader takes way too long to open, uses too much memory, and takes up too much space (which really goes along with too much memory). I'd rather remove it.
Even if the debates prove to be useful and a new format arises, I'm betting that Microsoft and Palm will probably integrate the new format in their eBook readers, but Adobe will probably do their own thing - they think they invented the "elect
Re:Better readers needed (Score:2)
The same cannot be said for the "Upgrade" model, the GEB1150. When Gemstar took over production from Rocket, then withdrew from manufacturing with RCA, they reworked the thing and made it useless. Gone are the ability to change font sizes beyond the default two loaded into the device, screen rotation, dictionary, the ability to load custom content, and the ability to backup content to a local
Re:Better readers needed (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Better readers needed (Score:2, Funny)
I dont know.... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is especially true for for factbooks who are often used as reference and not to be read just one time.
So far Ebooks cant beat the paper version in portability, convenience and ease of use.
Paperbook still seems more favorable to me.
Re:I dont know.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Because you might want to read an e-book of something NOT in the public domain, e.g, a current novel, and few authors or publishers are going to render their wares into a format that is going to end up on free P2P. There needs to be some way to ensure that money changes hands.
You were planning on paying for the books you read, weren't you? Or is this all just an exercise in seeing how we can best Napsterize the publishing indutstry?
Re:I dont know.... (Score:2, Insightful)
You were planning on paying for the books you read, weren't you? Or is this all just an exercise in seeing how we can best Napsterize the publishing indutstry?
I was.
Because you might want to read an e-book of something NOT in the public domain, e.g, a current novel, and few authors or publishers are going to render their wares into a format that is going to end up on free P2P.
libraries (Score:2)
Re:I dont know.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes. However, I want to be sure that I can still read the book
after my original hardware broke or I replaced it with a newer
model from another manufacturer. And even if the publisher and
the producer of the reader have gone ot of business.
When there is a standard for e-books that ensures I can keep
reading em, I'm willing to pay.
Re:I dont know.... (Score:2)
reading em, I'm willing to pay.
I completely agree with you. And until that degree of sophistication -- flexibility for the reader and security for the publisher -- is reached in the e-book software format, e-books of non-public-domain works will be scarce and multi-colored.
Look, even here on this "geek" board, loud are the arguments made for the current "analog" standard (paper). You can bet that the publishing industry is not racing to embrac
I do know (Score:3, Interesting)
That's because a lot of /. geeks are avid sci-fi readers, and they know what a good interface for a book is. Reference books are good candidates for ebooks (in open formats) because you want to search in a reference book. But for pleasure reading, the primary user requirements seem to be:
Like the word processing industry (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup - just like there's a plethora of essentially incompatible word processing formats - hampering the growth of the office/word processing market.
But the industry doesn't matter to one player - only their market share does.
The only way to really win this sort of thing is to persuade all (or at least most) consumers to boycott products that deliberately break compatability with standards.
But how likely is that to happen?
Re:Like the word processing industry (Score:3, Funny)
What plethora of formats? Everyone knows there's only the Word *.doc format!
Re:Like the word processing industry (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, yes...but WHICH Word *.doc format?
(By my recollection there've been at least four slightly incompatible ones. (95, 97, 2k/XP, 2k3))
Re:Like the word processing industry (Score:2)
Suite of formats (Score:3, Interesting)
That needs to be modded Funny.
By my reckoning, MS-Word has had more than 15 different formats in 9 years. I gave up MS-products for Lent a few years ago, but back in the day when my new laptop arrived with MS-Word95 (or whatever it was called), I had to go find MS-Word 6 and resave manually every last word document + metadata in RTF format in order to be able to read them in the new program.
Too bad the data format is tied i
Re:Like the word processing industry (Score:2)
There are a few factors that make the difference. Word processing is ubiquitous in business and very common for personal use as well whereas ebook users are virtually non-existant by comparison.
Most word procesor packages have a variety of formats they can read or write, some of them more or less standards. While they tend to screw up formatting somewhat when they do convert formats, it's better than nothing.
A major point of ebooks is that you can have a convieniant handheld reader with all of your book
Why propose a different standard? PDF!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
I think this was the mistake of the iTunes Music Store. While not terrible (actually slightly better quality) AAC is not as universal a standard as Mp3 or even Ogg. There are WAYS to encrypt and secure those formats. Napster, just before its demise, had figured out how to secure MP3's that were downloaded from it's system.
Re:Why propose a different standard? PDF!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
AAC is not as universal a standard as [...] Ogg.
Oh rubbish. AAC is used way more than Vorbis (which is what I assume you meant) is. Apple's target market was big enough to overtake Vorbis usage in a single day, I'd bet.
Re:Why propose a different standard? PDF!!! (Score:2, Informative)
PDF (while a great standard) doesn't do reflow very well. So on a handheld - page size becomes a total pain in the arse.
Re:Why propose a different standard? PDF!!! (Score:3, Informative)
Like hell it doesn't. Like many things to do with PDF, it all depends on what you use to create your PDF. You'll find that a PDF created from a page layout program (PageMaker, InDesign, FrameMaker) through Acrobat Distiller reflows a lot better than a PDF made from MS Works using some archaic version of Acrobat.
Nathan
Re:Why propose a different standard? PDF!!! (Score:2)
PDF preserves layout. This is useless when an ebook has to be read on devices ranging from handhelds to 21" monitors.
You are right though, leveraging existing work is always good. What's wrong with DocBook?
Re:Why propose a different standard? PDF!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
PDF only meets half the goals IMHO.
You really have 2 types of documents, and the chosen format needs to support them both well. PDF is well-suited to Magazines or other content with lots of graphics where the layout of the page is important. Such content could be standardized one or more standards of 'page size' for this kind of thing is chosen.
The other type of content is more like a novel, where it's just a very plain free-flow of text. Here, it would be nice to have the device render layout, allow the user to up the font size, etc. Something along the lines of plain vanilla HTML 1.0 would fit well. PDF explicitly positions everything, so it would be bulkier and less flexible.
As I see it, 2 formats are needed, one with set layout and positioning, and one for free-flowing text. PDF and a stripped-down HTML would seem to fit the bill nicely.
I agree. (Score:2)
I mean think about it: even the relatively low-powered CPU's used on PDA's have enough computing oomph to process and display
both PDF and HTML (Score:5, Insightful)
What I mean by that is that for many books with complicated layouts (including my own [lightandmatter.com] free books), it's simply not possible to reflow the text automatically. Consider an illustrated science textbook, which is the kind of work I do. There's a lot of hand-tweaking involved in getting everything laid out on the pages in the best possible way. And my books' layouts aren't even that complex compared to a lot of the big commercial textbooks out there. Some slashdotters may have used LaTeX to write academic papers, so they'll know how LaTeX tries hard to flow the text correctly, but ultimately it doesn't always do what you want, and either you or the publisher ends up doing more tweaking.
The solution isn't that complicated: if a publisher wants a book to make an electronic book available in both a a typographically rich version and an adaptable version, they can create both a PDF version and an HTML version. Of course, this is really an answer to a question that the publishers never asked. Most publishers don't want open formats, because open formats won't allow them to continue to steal away the rights of end-users, such as the right of first sale.
Survival of the best-marketed, I guess (Score:5, Interesting)
Sadly, there were better (open) formats using better compression and rendering, losing out to closed formats with big marketing push.
The format that ultimately prevails will not necessarily be the best. It'll be the format pushed by those with the greatest marketing skills/budget, and the one which gives them the greatest control over how their works are used.
It wouldn't surprise me if authors are already signing e-book distribution deals which forbid them from releasing in rival formats.
One of these days, the masses will choose software and data formats according to quality and freedom.
But something within me suspects that the Pope will convert to Islam, and the Jews will profess the divinity of Christ first.
FictionBook XML (Score:4, Informative)
http://haali.cs.msu.ru/pocketpc/FictionB
I use his excellent HaaliReader as a text reader on my pocketpc (fullscreen, landscape mode). There are also html2xml and word2xml tools on his site.
The ONLY Universal EBook Format! (Score:5, Informative)
This has created a need to present these Project Gutenberg Etexts in "Plain Vanilla ASCII" as we have come to call it over the years.
The reason for this is simple. .
However, this encourages others to improve our etexts in a variety of ways and to distribute them in a variety of the available media, as follows:
Once an etext is created in Plain Vanilla ASCII, it is the foundation for as many editions as anyone could hope to do in the future. Anyone desiring an etext edition matching, or not matching, a particular paper edition can readily do the changes they like without having to prepare that whole book again. They can use the Project Gutenberg Etext as a foundation, and then build in any direction they like.
Thus any complaints about how we do italics, bold, and the underscoring, or whether we should use this or that markup formula are sent back with encouragement to do it any ways any person wants it, and with the basic work already done, with our compliments.
The same goes for media. We have had a long-standing work ethic of providing our etexts in any medium people wanted: Amiga, Apple, Atari. .
However, now that our etexts are carried in so many BBS's, networks and other locations, it is easier to download the file in a manner that puts them in your format than we can make and mail a disk, so we don't really do that too much.
The major point of all this is that years from now Project Gutenberg Etexts are still going to be viable, but program after program, and operating system after operating system are going to go the way of the dinosaur, as will all those pieces of hardware running them. Of course, this is valid for all Plain Vanilla ASCII etexts. .
Do you want to go through all that again with every book a whole world ever puts into etext?
The value of Plain Vanilla ASCII is obvious. .
We don't have anything against markup. Not vice versa.
Alice in Wonderland, the Bible, Shakespeare, the Koran and many others will be with us as long as civilization. .
This includes the many requests we have for compression in particular formats. There are only two formats we know of that are suitable for transfer to a wide general audience: Plain Vanilla ASCII (.txt files) and ZIPped files of them, (.zip files). Requests for other compression formats must be ignored as they are appropriate only for small portions of our target audience. However, (programmers take note: we will need help) we are planning to put some compression links on our files so they can be transmitted in any of an assortment compression formats on the fly. i.e. we should be able to generate any kind of file asked for, but we can keep only one copy of each etext on our servers. .
Re:The ONLY Universal EBook Format! (Score:2)
Gutenbug limited to classics (Score:2)
Re:The ONLY Universal EBook Format! (Score:4, Interesting)
Those of us who are literate and computer savvy and have seen places other than the USA recognize the harm that reducing printed material to chunks of ASCII does. And far from mere loss of formatting or typographical embellishments much of the meaning of a text is destroyed when run through the chunky sieve of ASCII conversion. Most accented Roman characters cannot be rendered in ASCII. Non-Roman characters cannot be rendered in ASCII. Typographical features such as relative type size, style, and formatting are either lost entirely or reduced to the low-res rendering capabilities of monospaced ASCII. ASCII has no provision for rendering traditional methods of communicating typographically such as small caps, ligatures, distinction between hyphen, endash, and emdash, etc. despite the fact that virtually every printed text makes use of these features.
Digital technology has progressed without our friends at Project Gutenberg. There is an alternative to ASCII which is now standard to all major computing platforms: Unicode. From the unicode.org website [unicode.org]:
Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language. [unicode.org]
Encoding the PG texts in Unicode would require no extra effort on the part of the PG volunteers (well, those who have moved on from their TRS-80s, anyway).
Why not use technology that attempts to accomodate the typographical traditions inherent in your source material rather than reducing that material to fit an obsolete technology?
And even if you still cling to your belief in the infinite beauty, timelessness, and universality of ASCII, please stop using linefeeds every 70 characters within paragraphs. WTF do you Project Gutenbergers imagine we read these texts on TRS-80s?
but...but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Some uses want a format which is compact as possible. Some focus on readibility (switchable fots, etc.) Others -- facimile-style releases -- emphasize that the copy should as closely mimic the original work as possible. Formats can emphasize the syntactic structure of the text (sentences, paragraphs), or the structural qualities (line breaks, pages).
Even in their paper forms, books have different formats for different uses. Libraries prefer hardcovers, with durable bindings. Travlers prefer paperbacks, with small and light pages. Collectors pay extra for special editions, with quality supplies. Some readers prefer large-print copies, abridgements, or books on tape (in a choice of cassette tape or compact disc!)
Any format makes assumptions, and deletions. It's perfectly fine to have a multiplicity of formats. If its useable, and reasonably priced, people will buy it.
For me, the major hindrance to e-books is the price. Since there is no associated cost of the materials (paper/cardboard), printing, physical transportation, stocking space, and delivery, e-books should be [i]cheaper[/i] than physical books. But many of them are priced the same, or even high (you can check this at Amazon.) what's up with that?
SVG (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:SVG (Score:2)
Parent doesn't know what he is talking about... (Score:3, Interesting)
You don't know squat about the SVG format, do you?
If you took 2 minutes to check the SVG-specification [w3.org] you'd see that you are totaly wrong.
Text in SVG is described as... wait for it... ordinary text. The characters are then mapped to glyphs in your SVG-viewer. Just like in MS Doc, or
What ebooks really need to take off... (Score:3, Interesting)
The nice thing about a book is that it doesn't have a power switch - it's actually relaxing to sit there and read it.
If it were possible to obtain a high speed printer capable of printing out "e-books" in the same form-factor as a normal book (ie double sided pages, standard size, neatly bound) then I for one would pay for *lots* more books (and paper, and ink.)
Re:What ebooks really need to take off... (Score:3, Insightful)
no the nice thing about a book is that It cant be taken away from you, you can lend it to a friend, you can sell it at a garage sale or trade it in at a used book store.. all of which the Writers Guild DESPERATELY want to stop you from doing.
a paper book gives you a ton of freedom that publishers and writers are massively pissed off about and want to take away.
This is the real benefit.
Re:What ebooks really need to take off... (Score:2)
one.doc (Score:3, Insightful)
Take a look at this - 1dok.org [idok.org] - an open document format
Re:one.doc (Score:2)
eBooks and DRM (Score:3, Interesting)
Take 2 minutes and read this article from RMS
Right to Read [gnu.org]PDFs and html (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't you see these are at odds?
To make e-books as pleasant as real books, you're going to want to make them thinner and thinner in profile. You're going to want to make them run on a single lithium cell battery or AAA. You're going to want to drop all of the interface but the forward, back, and bookmarking buttons. You're going to want the computing device to be as close to nothing as possible, so you can put weight into making the device indestructible like a real book. You want to go to the store, buy the title, and have it just work, or go to Amazon and *know* your desired title is published in that format. That's the ideal, in the near term. It isn't a device that will easily accomodate PDFs and HTML and a number of other standards.
Re:PDFs and html (Score:2)
Re:PDFs and html (Score:2)
Personally, I'd take an old, easy to render HTML standard (Netscape 2 era) - just the basics. links, tables, frames, text stuff, images, nothing else. No javascript, no ASP, no CSS, no whatever. Support standard image types (jpeg, gif, png) and nothing else. For sanity's sake, do not support animated GIF.
Change the name - call it BkML - say its
Re:PDFs and html (Score:2)
1. Processing power and memory is cheap (in money,space and power requirements and) and it's getting cheaper
2. It does not takes too much to understand one more format if that's not overcomplicated.
however
3. It takes considerable processing power and memory to _render_ the characters, esp. if you want them to be rendered nicely (non-fixed length, antialiased and a lot of attributes that has silly names that only typographers understand
Exactly (Score:2, Interesting)
There's a lot to be said for plain text (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, of course some spiffy new format will have other advantages. But it's unlikely to gain quick acceptance. Plain text documents are everywhere, as are readers and other software. There are even online publishers [fictionwise.com] selling text files. In fact, ASCII text is arguably the most successful electronic standard there is!
Re:There's a lot to be said for plain text (Score:2)
There is no "Windows Latin-1" encoding, there's a Windows encoding - I think it's called codepage 1252 - that closly resembles ISO-8859-1 (or Latin-1). But, for me, it's not an option, since I live in Latin-2 land and there are people that use cyrillic, arabic, far-eastern or other alphabets, so your proposed solution would work only for America and the western parts of Europe.
Plain text, however, usually means ASCII (as it is in the Gutenberg-project
Re:There's a lot to be said for plain text (Score:2)
There are many Windows character encodings. The one I'm referring to is called 'Windows Latin-1' as well as 'CP1252'. It's effectively a superset of ISO Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1); the two are identical in the plain ASCII range 0-127, and also in the range 160-255 with accented characters &c. The only difference is in 128-159, where ISO La
Re:There's a lot to be said for plain text (Score:2)
And even in those cases where you'd want embedded images, a PDF-like format is not the way to go. It may look great on the right size of screen, and work wonderfully for printing (which was its aim), but as a general book format it's hamstrung by the fixed layo
Re:There's a lot to be said for plain text (Score:2)
Yes, plain text does limit what you can represent. (Though as I said above, I find that practically all of what I want fits within that limit.) However, a more complex format is also limiting: it limits what you can do with the file. You may gain the ability to show italics directly, but you lose the ability to knock up simple Perl scripts; you may gain embedded images, but you lose compatibi
I can see it now. This will be... (Score:2)
Can we keep inventing more readers for specific uses?
What's next? A new text reader for Man files that can only be read by one single reader and is hard to port to different text formats?
Dolemite
______________
My proposed format (Score:5, Funny)
Each character of the book is to be enciphered to a byte. I reserve the first 32 codes (0-31) for various system function characters. The next 32 codes (32-63) encipher the space character, various punctuation marks, and numerals. The next 32 codes encipher the capital alphabet and a few more punctuation characters. With the simple use of 00111111 binary mask 'A' maps to 1, 'B' maps to 2, and 'Z' maps to 26. Quite clever if I say so myself! Naturally the next 32 codes encipher the lowercase letters in the same manner. Using the very same 00111111 bitmask you find 'a' mas to 1, 'b' maps to 2, and 'z' maps to 26! Ingenious, isn't it?
To ensure compatibility with legacy computer systems values above 127 shall not be used.
I call this encoding Advanced Storage Cypherment Input Ideal - or A.S.C.I.I. Any file utilizing this encipherment is a Tagged eXchange Template. These files may be identified by the use of a
-
Re:My proposed format (Score:2, Funny)
Can you say TeX & PS? (Score:3, Informative)
pdf{tex,latex} (Score:3, Informative)
But TeX/LaTeX has the advantage of being pretty much immutable, second only to plain TXT on that count. The standard hasn't changed since, what, 1982? Hopefully we'll be able to process the same documents with the same tools fifty years from now.
I think the important di
Stating the obvious (Score:2)
And yes, html is more than enough. This is a book, not a website. Its about reading words, nothing more nothing less. if you start up with the pictures and sound, people will ignore you in favor of a movie or TV...
I bet someone will propose flash
eBook != replacement of conventional books (Score:2)
The arival of almost every other new media since the invention of the printing press, has been heralded as marking the end of the printed word. This hasn't happened in the past and I expect the same will be true of the eBook when it matures.
Historically new media have complimented rather than replaced existing ones. eBooks and Monograph lit
Its pre-chosen (Score:2, Interesting)
DRM Capability: Although end-users prefer not to purchase ebooks protected with DRM (Digital Rights Management), publishers are certainly interested in the DRM capability of the universal ebook format. Thus, the universal ebook format must allow inclusion of DRM protection technologies as needed.
Its obvious that the
Standard format (Score:2)
Maybe if there is no standard, authors will pick the format that allows them the exact type of access control that they want instead of having a format thrust upon them.
The solution? (Score:3, Insightful)
Adobe, can you hear me? Business Opportunity Nocking.
Another perspective... (Score:3, Interesting)
My wife has a small publishing/consulting company that has taken us 16 years -- and a lot of investment and pain -- to build. She works her butt off gathering the content which she then publishes as print products and CD-ROM "ebooks".
She is devastated when she hears from someone that they've copied one of her color newsletters; made a "backup" of the CD-ROM ebook and someone else "happens to be reading it so I thought I'd call with a question"; and otherwise copies illegally (no...we don't have the funds to pursue them). She had an opportunity to publish a digital product in Asia and another in Latin America but these markets are notorious for buying *one* and suddenly hundreds or thousands appear (I could digress with a personal story when I was at a software company and saw this first-hand...but it's too long).
PDF is the best standard right now. Platform support for everything out there virtually; security; but there is no meaningful method of DRM that would protect a small businessperson AND make it relatively easy to move ebooks from device-to-device (I know that I would hate to have to remember codes from dozens of publishers; be locked in to one machine for viewing; or other cumbersome methods).
However, no protection = no incentive. I don't care if you're an recording artist seeing your music ripped off or someone like my wife struggling to grow a business. Why should my bride travel to Europe and domestically gathering content; pay correspondents and photographers; and publish a product in ebook format that is super-simple to copy and distribute?
This is why I'm struggling so hard with the whole discussion about ebooks; copyright; DRM and fair use. So some how, some way, we've got to come up with a solution that offers some sort of universal ebook format that content producers can agree on and users can live with.
My $.02....
Re:Another perspective... (Score:2, Insightful)
Mass pirating in Asia asside, why not look at this from another direction?
Instead of being sad when a person who "happens" to get a copy somehow phones with questions, I would be happy, thrilled even, to have a potential new customer who would probably otherwise never have heard of me or even considered buying my stuff!!!
As an indenpendant publisher, your biggest obstacle is probably obscurity, not piracy. The occasional 'casual' copy exchanged from friend to friend is the best advertising your going
Re:Another perspective... (Score:3, Insightful)
CD's didn't have "protection" until recently- what they've come up with is useless.
Cassette didn't have "protection". Neither did vinyl.
Everybody did FINE without protection. Protection does NOT equate to incentive. Lack of protection does NOT equate to lack of incentive.
How do you deal with piracy? Not by locking the stuff up. You deal with it by making it such that it is no longer profitable to do so- that is the REAL reason why piracy happens.
Why I don't e-book (Score:2, Interesting)
Shadow Puppets (hardcover) by Orson Scott Card is priced on Amazon for USD$18.15
Electronic version USD$25.95 (M$Reader and Adobe)
With the e-version the pubisher has no printing costs, no binding costs, virtualy no shipping costs, no warehousing fees, no sales clerks.
Like most everyone, I prefer my books on paper, but there are times where an e-book version would be convenient. But I am not going to pay 4 times the paperback price for the experience.
Look at the Cellular markets (Score:2, Interesting)
The gaping flaw in their argument (Score:5, Insightful)
"Right now there's a plethora of essentially incompatible ebook formats, and this format 'babel' is hampering the growth of the ebook industry."
Bullshit.
The problem is that the few people who actually still read books are not likely to be stupid people. On top of that, the people who are reading electronic formats of books are even less likely to be stupid people.
However, it would take rather dim consumers indeed to not see a problem with paying the exact same cost for an eBook as one would in a brick and mortar bookstore for a paperback... and strangely when I go to these eBook sellers online, I see exactly that. "Oh joy! Instead of paying $7.95 for that paperback over an Barnes & Noble, I can pay just $7.95 to download an electronic copy in a format that I probably won't be able to read again in 10 years because the format and it's reader will have been declared obsolete!"
The unwillingness of eBook publishers to see eBooks as something other than a way to increase sales profits by cutting out the middlemen of printing and shipping expenses is what is hampering eBook adoption.On Beyond ASCII (Score:4, Informative)
Why? Well, an ASCII text version of a printed book is really more like an analog facsimile than is a version in XML that has been tagged for structural features. Leaving aside issues of non-English characters, illustrations, and unusual typography, ASCII does a relatively poor job of capturing all of the structural conventions that exist in printed books. Books have copyright pages, tables of contents, chapter titles, subtitles, bylines, epigraphs, block quotations, footnotes, running headers and footers, citation lists, etc. ASCII can provide rough format equivalents of some of these, very poor equivalents of others. With an appropriate XML tagset, however, it's a relatively simple matter to tag most of the structural features of a book and then use stylesheets for presentational rendering. That's the whole assumption of the Open eBook specification.
Suppose you're in a world where all printed copies of Huckleberry Finn have been lost. You have two CD-ROMS that somehow you've managed to decode so that you can read the files and interpret their character sets. One of them contains the Project Gutenberg [ibiblio.org] etext of the novel, an ASCII transcription. The other contains an XML encoding tagged according to a DTD from the Text Encoding Initiative [tei-c.org], the current best standard for encoding literary (and many other) texts. It has all of the textual content of the PG version, as well as some that's missing (like the table of contents and the copyright page from the transcribed edition, which the PG version unaccountably omits). XML tags mark all the line and page breaks of the original. In addition, there are tags to mark quoted speech, unusual typography, words in foreign languages, and other significant features of the original. The CD-ROM contains the DTD used along with documentation on the tagset.
In this imaginary scenario, even if all of the XML documentation were missing it would be pretty straightforward for 31st-century programmers to strip out the tags and recreate the ASCII transcription. But with the documentation, it's possible to reconstruct something much closer to the original than the plain-vanilla PG version allows. And suppose your 31st-century archaeologist found a trove of TEI-tagged books on CD: with all of the structural tagging and metadata about authorship, publication dates, etc., a 31st-century librarian will be able to plug all of the books into a cataloging system that allows sophisticated searching. If instead you had a trove of plain-ASCII books, the best you could do with the collection would be simple full-text searches.
Leaving aside the sci-fi scenario, the reality is that our documents, over the next few decades, will move from format to format and be used for purposes that we can only guess at right now. Of course plain ASCII, or even proprietary formats, will be better than no documents at all. But the work involved in converting them will be a lot higher than if they are tagged in a well-documented, structured markup language.
Incidentally, there's already at least one project underway [hwg.org] to take Project Gutenberg texts and add minimal XHTML or XML markup to capture structure and make them more readable via stylesheets. The Open eBook specification is just a more sophisticated way of doing the same thing.
*Please* not fixed layout (eg PDF) (Score:2)
I can't shrink the font size to get more text on the screen, because I'm viewing one page at a time and it's always got the same text on it. Even worse, I loaded the same eBook in the desktop version of the reader, and I was still viewing the same amount of text at once, in a ludicrously large fon
It really isn't the formats... (Score:5, Insightful)
Halfprice, maybe even quarter price, compared to deadtree is what ebooksellers should be going for...but if I still have to pay fullprice and I don't even get my dead tree, I'll pay the same for something slightly more tangible.
Now I would pay a couple of bucks (ie $2) more for a deadtree book which includes the etext.
This says it all, really. (Score:3, Insightful)
>protected with DRM (Digital Rights Management),
>publishers are certainly interested in the DRM
>capability of the universal ebook format.
So although people would prefer not to buy books with this stuff, we're going to put it in there anyway. Whatever happened to listening to your customers?
Re:Babel? (Score:5, Informative)
Shows what I know.
A couple of side notes: And how can you not know what babel is? Babel: Tower of babel: a story from the bible where King Nebekenezur (there is no correct spelling for that in english, just commonly accepted ones) wanted to build a tower to god, so god being jealous, put a spell on everyone, and they all ended up speaking a different language. It's how the christians believe that there came to be multiple languages.
Now the website babelfish gets its name from 'The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy' by Douglas Adams, where the characters 'stick a babelfish in their ear' to act as a universal translator.
Re:Babel? (Score:2, Informative)
Nebuchadnezzar lived during the time of Daniel. The events of the Tower of Babel are chronicled in the book of Genesis.
Re:Babel? (Score:2)
Re:Babel? (Score:2)
See, true inovation doesnt come from "it works now, why mess with it" mentality.
What about an eBook about graphic layout, where rich text, graphics, and presentation make the book. There just are some things you cant do with HTML.
And how to do you propose you encrypt and protect from distribution a bunch of html files and images? Thats the whole point of eBooks - a rich, open , and protect
Dynamic fonts (Score:3, Informative)
With CSS there's not a lot HTML can't do with layouts.
No free, mature implementation of HTML and CSS can render a font not installed on the user's machine from outline data stored in the document. Mozilla has a bug on this open in bugzilla.mozilla.org (bug 52746), but it doesn't look like it's going anywhere. And no, "just replace with Helvetica, which is installed everywhere" is not an option because Helvetica for every non-Latin writing system is not installed on every reading device.
Re:HTML? (Score:3, Informative)
But sensibly-done "plain" HTML is generally better. For an example, look at Baen.com [baen.com]. In the upper right is a "free" link that points to a bunch of sci-fi works that are online. You can get them in several formats. The HTML is a good choice in most cases, because it's not overly fancy, but produces good rendering in just about any HTML-capable window on any size screen.
So, even i
Re:Honest question... (Score:2)
But I'm with you, provided that html tags are standardized for e-books. Keep them at a bear minium so lamer display devices and less of a chance of a really garish e-book comming out. Basic HTML makes alot of sence.
Problem being is I think people want who want to sell e-books don't want
Re:why even have eBooks? (Score:2)
Well, for one thing, so that a person can read the book for themselves (but that's too obvious
Audio is the SLOW alternative (Score:2)
I can read a page of a standard paperback book in about 30 seconds for fiction, or between 45 sec. and a minute for non-fiction.
Having a voice read that to me instead would be slow and tiresome.
ASA
Re:Obvious (Score:2)
docbook is good for technical documentation (hence the "doc" part of the name), but not for general purpose use. Believe it or not, there are a lot of publishers out there who do not publish computer manuals.