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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...
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?