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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.
Is Project Gutenberg and a Palm Pilot.
There also is this e-book xml format:o ok_descri ption.html
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 Project Gutenberg Etexts should so easily used that no one should ever have to care about how to use, read, quote and search them ...
.it is the only text mode that is easy on both the eyes and the computer.
.to IBM, to Mac, to TRS-80. . .
.not just those your access has allowed you to get from Project Gutenberg. The point is that a decade from now we probably won't have the same operating systems, or the same programs and therefore all the various kinds of etexts that are not Plain Vanilla ASCII will be obsolete. We need to have etexts in files a Plain Vanilla search/reader program can deal with; this is not to say there should never be any markup. . .just those forms of markup should be easily convertible into regular, Plain Vanilla ASCII files so their utility does not expire when programs to use them are no longer with is. Remember all the trouble with CONVERT programs to get files changed from old word processor programs into Plain Vanilla ASCII?
.so is very much of the value of most of the various markup systems we have in the world. But until some real standards arrive-- we would be limiting our options a great deal if we do not keep copies of all etexts in Plain Vanilla ASCII as well.
.an operating system, a program, a markup system. . .will not.
.as the .Z compression format does in a similar manner today.
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. .
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.
Speak for yourself.
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 etext of the novel, an ASCII transcription. The other contains an XML encoding tagged according to a DTD from the Text Encoding Initiative, 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 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.