OeBF Tower of eBabel gets knock in academic journal–while OpenReader gets nice link
Whoops. Just around the time the Proprietary Formatters Association has spent thousands to lull educators and librarians into complacency over the Tower of eBabel, a pesky Norwegian academic has attacked proprietary formats and DRM.
This is one of the key points in Terje Hillesund’s new article in the peer-reviewed Journal of Digital Information based in the UK.
Hillesund says print-era prejudices are interfering with the blossoming of digital media. Indeed! Certain traditional publishers and profit-crazed software companies with proprietary approaches seem all too fond of the costly eBabel Tower–propped up by the “Open” eBook Forum. Hillesund does not mention the OeBF by name, but his target is clear. Enjoy! “Instead of agreeing to such a standard end-user format,” he writes of the inevitable solution, “big companies like Adobe, Palm and Microsoft seem to be willing to fight (a futile fight) over markets. This policy will certainly not speed up e-book interest among readers.”
Adding to the fun, Hillesund’s scholarly essay links approvingly to the rival OpenReader Consortium, where I’m among the ringleaders. An excerpt follows.
As we have seen, commercial constraints on publishers, and the tenacity of perceptions regarding the nature of text, affect the pace and direction of its digital transformation. So do other social factors, such as economic competition, the establishment and nature of digital rights management systems and readers’ behaviour. Experience with e-books may illustrate how these factors work.
At the present time (2004) one of the leading American online e-book stores (Fictionwise) offers e-books in eight unsecured and four “secure” formats. These are all proprietary formats connected to different reading applications, reading devices and digital rights management systems. Readers can hardly be expected to accept such a chaotic plethora of formats, and it is not likely that any of them will survive.
What most readers want is a simple system that allows them to purchase e-books from any retailer or publisher and read them on whatever device, operating system or reading software they choose (Lee et al. 2002, OpenReader). Instead of agreeing to such a standard end-user format, big companies like Adobe, Palm and Microsoft seem to be willing to fight (a futile fight) over markets. This policy will certainly not speed up e-book interest among readers.
Besides the chaos surrounding formats, there are many different online payment systems and several incompatible DRM systems. The latter, in particular, are a major impediment to e-book diffusion.
In digital environments, texts can be copied and distributed endlessly, without loss of quality. To ensure the income of writers and publishers some kind of copy protection is needed. However, recent US and EU legislation has disturbed a time-tested balance in favour of the “content owners”, i.e. publishers, such as Random House and Penguin, and multinational media companies, such as Disney and Bertelsmann. In current DRM systems, the contents of e-books are strictly protected by technological obstructions, which deprive readers and buyers of privacy protection and undermine established owner rights to lend or sell books or to take copies for private use or safekeeping. Many scholars and politicians claim that the new DRM regimes also violate democratic values connected to freedom of speech and free float of information.
In the area of intellectual property and copy protection there are many conflicting interests between readers, writers, scholars, libraries, universities, publishers, software producers, hardware producers and multinational media conglomerates. Around the world there are economic, social and cultural struggles going on regarding intellectual property and digital rights management. Achieving a satisfactory balance between the interests of all those affected will call for a lot of rethinking, leading to new concepts, practices and legislation (Lynch 2001). This, in turn, will profoundly affect the organization of e-book cycles.
Besides format and DRM issues the development of e-book markets is heavily dependent on readers’ behaviour. It is not easy to predict what use the general public will make of e-books, what kinds of e-books readers will buy or what books the majority of readers will prefer in printed versions. Nor can we be certain how teachers and students will react to e-books.
Unlike radio, television and the Internet, which were altogether new media, e-books compete with a highly valued existing medium, the printed book. Over the centuries, the printed book has developed into a very sophisticated reading technology. Its distribution system is well established (Hillesund 2001). In addition, printed books are highly valued artefacts, associated with some of the most fundamental values of civilized society: knowledge, education, understanding, development, democracy, literature and culture. To many people, shelves full of books are convincing status symbols that indicate the owner’s cultivation and learning.
To compete with printed books, e-books must improve in readability, price, interoperability, rights of use and cultural status. It is likely that the advantages of e-books (re-flow, linking, hypertext, multimedia, interactivity, storage capacities and accessibility) must be improved, and that e-books must develop into a qualitatively new medium, with new genres and new uses, before they can seriously challenge the domination of paper books.
Within the world of software and standards, we at OpenReader are interested in the very qualities that Hillesund wants for digipubs.
Details: Is this a Norwegian conspiracy? Jon Noring, OpenReader’s Minnesota-raised main founder, is Norwegian in ethnic background. Actually, however, the Hillsund article is just part of an “Open” conspiracy–reflecting the passion of Europeans for interoperability and a true open approach, unlike the grotesquely misleading variety about which the OeBF tries to hookwink librarians, educators, publishers and consumers.
Innocents: Lots of innocent companies decided to participate in the OeBF’s education conference simply because they wanted to hook up with buyers. That’s okay. Here’s to prosperity! But everyone should keep in mind that OeBF’s reasons for the conference are hardly altruistic. The OeBF wants revenue, and more importantly, the software companies behind it want respectability for their beloved Tower of eBabel.
More on the “international” angle: I’m amused by OeBF’s name change to the International Digital Publishing Forum. While the French-based Mobipocket is part of the OeBF and a supporter of the proprietry approach, the OeBF is basically a marketing and PR tool of American software companies keen on short-term profits. Actually they’re hurting themselves. Proprietary formats are about as good for digipubs in the long run as acidic paper is for books. Such formats lessen the durability of digipubs and help cause them to be taken less seriously than p-books and the rest.
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