e-books that aren’t
Everyone knows what an e-book is. You read it on a screen, probably one that you’re holding in your hand. You tap or swipe or click to turn the page. And there’s a table of contents that helps you get to what you’re looking for.
This definition is in the process of being changed. It is being changed in a way that will illegitimise a lot of extremely useful e-books. And worst of all, in all the talk about formats and standards and channels and DRM, no-one even notices that the change is happening, so nobody thinks about the damage it’s doing or whether this is a price worth paying for progress.
I’ll illustrate this with Universalis, because I publish it and it’s what I know best.
Universalis is an e-book. It gives psalms, prayers and readings for the seven daily Hours of the Catholic Church, plus Mass readings and a couple of other goodies. These all change every day, so the table of contents is a calendar. Tap on the date you want, select an Hour, and start reading. Obviously an e-book.
The new definition of an e-book is “something that comes in an ePub file” (or .mobi, or AZW, or PDF – it doesn’t change the argument). No-one notices the change, because all e-books come as files anyway, don’t they?
No. They don’t. They can’t. Universalis is the example I know best but I’m sure it isn’t the only one.
The thing about pages in ePub files is that they exist. They sit in the file somewhere and they’re pulled out and formatted when you want to look at them. The thing about pages in Universalis is that they don’t exist. There is no section of the file that contains the text for 29 July 2013 – but when you tap on “29 July 2013″ in the table of contents, then – and only then – Universalis synthesizes the page and presents it to you.
We don’t do it this way because it’s admirably geeky and makes for a small download (4MB). We do it because it’s impossible any other way.
Imagine Universalis as an ePub file. How many chapters would it have? One for each date, obviously. And how many dates are there? Not 365. Not even 7×365 once you take days of the week into account. Because there are 2-year and 3-year cycles of readings, and because Easter moves around in the calendar, there have to be well over 6,000 chapters in the ePub file. At maximum compression, that would be 170MB in ePub, which is monstrous and impracticable.
You may say, ‘Then don’t do it like that, issue annual volumes instead at 9MB a go, and it’ll be a nice new revenue stream for you’. There is a lot to be said about subscriptions and repeat sales, and I’ll say it one day; but not now. For now I will just point out that you are saying, ‘Any ordinary person would say that your e-book is an e-book, but we say that it isn’t any more. So tear up your business model and start again. Change, or die.’
It may have to come to that. Mass markets are based on standardisation and so there will always be casualties. There is something to be said, as well, about the tension between appliances and programmability, and I’ll say it one day.
For now, though, I have a simple question:
Are we alone, or there other e-books out there that need some degree of intelligence and programmability and can’t be packaged into a dumb, passive ePub file?
August 4th, 2009 at 10:14 am
That’s an interesting question.
I suspect there are other ‘books’ out there that could do with a bit of intelligence. But I don’t think they should be called ebooks.
Universalis is a computer program that looks like an book. The ePub standard explicitly forbids the execution of scripts in ePub ebooks, probably because of the danger posed by such scripts. It’s bad enough having to worry about every program one uses. Trojan Horse ebooks would be much worse.
I’d dislike having something called an ebook actually running code behind my back. I think Universalis is a good idea - but I think it should be labelled explicitly as a computer program, not an ebook.
August 4th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Despite the whines you will no doubt get from the ePub Gallery, I’m for you. You have a true DIGITAL BOOK, not a lame, flat, static one-dimensional lightly tarted-up text file.
>>>Everyone knows what an e-book is.
No, they don’t!
August 4th, 2009 at 10:46 am
What other uses would there be for Universalis type system? I’m probably never going to read liturgical or religious documents; and if I did, I’d mostly likely read straight through or selections for whatever research I was doing, so the kind of functionality described wouldn’t be of much use to me.
Almost all texts I have ever read or would read are linear with a few exceptions. Anthologies with a good table of contents allow me to skip around if I want to. For me the “one-dimensional lightly tarted-up text file” (mobi, epub, et al) does just fine for my reading needs. Anything else would probably just be confusing.
However, if the Universalis works for your reading needs, then go for, though I doubt it will be coming to an eink machine anytime soon.
August 4th, 2009 at 10:47 am
I am somewhat familiar with Universalis… and in fact I am a big fan of it. For someone who is interested in praying the Divine Office, it makes things a lot easier. Normally if one wants to pray the divine office, it would require 4 reasonably hefty volumes and there is generally a fair bit flipping between sections as you say the prayers and the readings. Depending on the date and the season, different combinations of prayers and readings are read. Universalis makes it easy by doing away with all the flipping by presenting the user with a single page with all the readings and prayers on it.
The thing is, Universalis has always tended to be more an application than the conventional ebook. Certainly no previous standard supported it directly. In fact, I would say the biggest problem with Universalis as an ebook is that it is a head of its time. It has capabilities that the vast majority of ebooks don’t have. It points to the potential of the medium — not so much for novels and the like, but think about technical manuals, text books (and student work books) and a host of other books where the idea generally is not to read the whole book but to read the specific part that is important to you right now.
Ultimately we are entering a world where we are combining a number of different media into new unique combinations… its not just application, or text, or video or audio, but a combination of all of them and more.
August 4th, 2009 at 10:49 am
this is the most freaking interesting thing i’ve read in ages. are you telling us that you have an e-book whose content is stored as database, the experience of which is dynamic — constructed on the fly by the user, who is sending a query to the database, whether or not s/he know that’s what’s happening?
how head-spinningly *cool*!