Universal Ebook Format Debated

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.

Comments

Well

[The-Bus]

If the software pirating industry can all agree on plain text "NFO" files with ASCII-painted flames, dragons eating your group's logo, and pot leaves surrounding shout-outs to your boys on efnet, I think the slightly more professional and law-abiding ebook industry can agree on a standard format.

My proposed format

[Alsee]

I have developed a higly sophisticated format for storing books in a computer file.

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 .TXT extention.

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