Apple to buy up Adobe and lord it over e-bookdom? Microsoft to devour Yahoo?
That’s an old photo of Steve Jobs, but does he have a new reason to look so bleepin’ smug?
Why Apple will buy Adobe is the not-so-wishy-washy headline over Robert X. Cringley’s speculation.Such a move would “give it effective dominance of digital content creation and distribution on a global scale. Bruce Chizen suddenly stepped down as Adobe’s CEO without warning: why? A caretaker CEO (my characterization—no slight intended) is in place. Steve has always viewed Adobe co-founder and co-chair John Warnock like a father. Warnock and co-chair Chuck Geschke are losing interest in Adobe day-to-day as they move on with their lives. Acquiring Adobe would make Apple much more of a cross-platform company.”
The standards angle: Buyout could cut either way
So would this hurt or help the e-book standards cause? Adobe has been one of the biggest supporters of the IDPF and the .epub standard. My sense is that Jobs is too much of a control freak to play well with others. But you never know. Jobs is selling nonDRMed MP3s, and, if he extended the same philosophy to e-books, he could encourage publishers to make a lot of changes for the better. Problem is, Apple is still turning big bucks off DRM infestations. Mike Cane has his own take.
Also of interest, of course, is Adobe’s ownership of the PDF standard and its recent talk of reflowable PDF. I still wonder what the latter means for .epub. Hey, Bill, what’s cookin’? The worst scenario could be that Adobe, in anticipation of an Apple takeover, was regressing to the worst of its PDFish proprietary ways for e-books, and to hell with the IDPF. I doubt it. But reassurance from Adobe’s Bill McCoy would be nice.
Just what might all this stuff mean to Amazon? What if the iPod of e-books turned out to be the iPod—and the iPhone and an Apple tablet—and not the Kindle?
Talk of Microsoft buying Yahoo
Just to cheer you up further, e-book fans, the New York Times’ Saul Hansell quotes stock analyst Jeffrey Lindsay as saying Yahoo could be a tempting takeover target because the stock has swooned. Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal says Yahoo isn’t gung ho on a buyout; and Hansell agrees. But he says that “if Yahoo’s shares keep falling, and Microsoft decides it is willing to spend more for Yahoo than it is worth on paper, there could be a very interesting hostile offer down the road.”
So what would Microsoft’s ownership of Yahoo mean for e-book standards? Not the best of news. Microsoft has parted company with the IDPF and doesn’t give a squat about standards. Yahoo could be a distribution and marketing vehicle for books in a Bill-blessed format.
Oh, and one other thing. A Microsoft takeover of Yahoo might not be a godsend for Beth Wellington and the data portability movement. Microsoft all too often prefers the Roach Motel approach to formats and the rest. Users check in but don’t necessarily check out. Want to move your Yahoo 360 files elsewhere? Fergit! But as with Apple, wildcards abound. Guess what I’m using to compose this post? Windows Live Writer, and it works great with WordPress. Hmm. Is Microsoft planning to buy WordPress? Unlikely. Still, you wonder what these guys are up to.
And speaking of Microsoft: The latest from OLPC News is that there’ll be no dual boot arrangement, but that Micro would still love to get XP on the XO.
January 12th, 2008 at 3:28 am
Interesting moves.
EPUB is such a clean and clear format, that at this stage the standard has clear advanatages. Whatever happens to ADOBE may only really on effects the fortunes of Digital Editions - I think we are fairly safe in that direction.
However, CSS is so limited typographically, I have long pinned my hopes on dynamically generated PDF through stylesheets.
The promise of reflowable PDF may be a real blessing, but the tenuous preservation of XML markup in PDF also needs to be addressed and ADOBE has not been as good as it should on this. Reflowable PDF may be perfect solution, or a perfect curse for e-books. It is wait and see.
However, alternatives are not limited. EPUB specifies SVG graphics, and these could supply just the typographical control needed to produce nice looking pages on e-paper devices (which I believe is an important key to the growth of e-publishing).
If one door closes, or becomes too hemmed in for practical and open use, perhaps another can be forced to serve the purpose, perhaps even better a better alternative?
January 12th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Data portability will be a very important issue for major websites in 2008.
Along our support for epub and IDPF, Feedbooks will also study
microformats and other similar ways to create data/service standards.
We already have a standard file format for e-books, the next step
might be a standard markup for e-books published on the Web (something
we could easily turn into an epub file) ?
January 12th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Hadrien I think you are very right but I would suggest a strange caveat.
Strange because we immediately think in terms of an XML structure of the book’s contents and that I would dismiss. Horses for courses, DTBook, DocBook, TEI etc.,. only have XML in common, but little in terms of structure - I believe this is a good thing. Not just the books but the different reading needs suggest very differnt forms of markup.
TYPOGRAPHICAL AND REFERENCE STANDARDS.
However, at the micro-level, of attributes, entities, ids, internal referencing and application of common elements we do need, especially for e-books, tighter standards and consistant application.
Part of this could be resolved by better tools.
For instance: quotes should in my opinion be totally replaced by “q” elements, let the stylesheet look after nesting. We should either have the single closing quote always representing an apostrophe, or use the “apos” entity, likewise with the treatment of hyphens, softhyphens, soft-new-page markers within the text — these details should be made consistant, clear and easy to follow.
If we could get typorgaphical issues sorted out, content at least could be treated consistently, even if the tagging cannot (which I think is best solved at another level - transformation tools).
UNIQUE ID GENERATION
In a couple of days I will be announcing a simple system of generating Unique Identity Codes, this is something each and every publication should include.
A standard here is much needed. For instance, each author should have an ID, each Work, each Publisher, each Translator and every Edition. E-books should always be referenced by their Edition ID for this can reference all the relevant information pertaining to them.
EPUB allows for inclusion of unlimited ID space in the Dublin Core RDF section, only one of course can be the reference to the work in the main. It would be nice to get this right from the begining.
For this to be useful however, we need a world registry, it need no be very complex and any University library could be its home.
This week I also am hopeing to talk to a University Librarian to see if it will be willing to act as respoitory of catalogues of e-book editions. I hope if this fails, that someone else might persuade some other institution to take responsiblity.
Generating world wide unique id codes, anonymously, with the added advantage of being able to generate on a local machine endless extra unique codes (once a net code is obtained), has some importance for e-books and much else. Next week (with the help of a small company) I hope I will have a wiki, the basic codes and site for generating the codes, up and running (it is a free service).
EPUB AND THE NET
The thing that strikes me about epub format is its simplicity. An unzipped form on a website requires nothing else but a browser for online reading - zip it up and it is an e-book. Maybe browsers can handle Zipped directories, and this would simplify things even more, an internal href would then open the book, download the directory and delivers the e-book ready to read.
The only major change I would envisage for the format is the acceptence of any well formed XML as the base file - hence XHMTL 1.1, DTBook, TEI, DocBook could be included.
Publisher standards are to my mind a different thing. How quotes are dealt with, IDs, referencing, when entities should and should not be used, in English and similar languages whether UFT8 should be mandated or not etc., nuts and bolts stuff.
Best practice standards, whether dialogue in novels should have speaker references in their attributes (for audio), and how to do this that is largely consistent to most XML markup schemes, or should such audio prompts be set externally in a style sheet (I tend to favour the latter).
PS
Hadrien, given your excellent work on feedbooks, I would be very interested in your opinions on these suggestions.
January 13th, 2008 at 4:01 am
[...] will introduce a tablet - although this is not likely to happen. (I should also add that there was speculation yesterday that Apple would buy Adobe and all I can say to that is I HATE THE ADOBE FORMAT AND DRM system. [...]
January 14th, 2008 at 11:37 am
This answers what “There is something in the air” (MacWorld 2008 posters) means: a reference to Adobe AIR.
January 28th, 2008 at 2:39 pm
Sorry Greg, I just saw your post a minute ago.
Typography
There’s currently a lack of advanced typography support in both formats and readers. Hyphenation for example should be a basic feature in every reader. Formats based on XML should extend their support for advanced typography, if we want something as good looking as PDF/print, yet reflowable.
Unique ID
Creating a database for unique IDs is a pretty tough work. You also need an easy way for anyone to get these unique ID through web services (REST/SOAP), avoid or group together duplicate entries, a good search system that will recognize the book name even if it’s slightly mispelled etc…
I understand why having a unique ID system widely available would be fantastic, but it’s something that will need a lot of time/work.
epub and the net
Yes, it would be very easy for most browsers to support natively epub and this would help the format.
I would also like an easy way to “widgetize” an epub file. With more and more blogs, social networks and forums, I’m sure that a lot of people would love to embed books or sections of a book to display them on their own webpage.