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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.
Why should i choose a format that have all possibilities to have DRM included in the future thus allowing only one read. And will require Electricity to read.
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.
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.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
I had a taste of incompatible e-Book formats when I got my first colour Palm.
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.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
... is paper. Seriously.
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.)
Take 2 minutes and read this article from RMS
Right to Readplease proff read !
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 (WAP or desktop)
There's also an as yet unused discussion group at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wapnovel
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
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....
I'm happy you brought Project Gutenberg into the discussion. PG is a wonderful resource. When the project was nascent in the 1970s and 80s reading ASCII on your TRS-80 probably seemed pretty neat. But now that the PG dream of preserving and distributing the printed word through digital technology has stagnated into a dogmatic cult with the goal of preserving ASCII it's time to reevaluate the meaning of Project Gutenberg.
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 provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language.
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?