This Fourth of July isn't just the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It's also the 32nd birthday of Project Gutenberg, the oldest etext publisher on the Net.

In fact, the Declaration was the very first text that Gutenberg founder Michael Hart typed into a mainframe at the University of Illinois for e-publication--on the way to the group's 8,500 texts today, ranging from works of Homer to Tom Swift and His Airship.

Here's the Gutenberg version of the Declaration...and here's a more modern incarnation, courtesy the RaptorBook.org site run by TeleRead CTO James Linden, who is also one of Michael Hart's main format mavens. Many changes are ahead for the Gutenberg site itself, and you needn't be a scholar or Linden-level techie to volunteer and take part in this evolution.

Keep in mind Gutenberg's special place in the world of public domain, the doctrine under which books may be legally reproduced for free once copyrights expire. If no one uses this doctrine, then it will crumble. To support Gutenberg is to help keep the copyright greedsters at bay as best we can. Happy birthday, Gutenberg!
posted by David Rothman at 6:27 PM | permanent link

Beware of the Tories of the Internet era. Let us honor the Declaration of Independence, signed July 4, 1776, and remember that political, economic and media freedoms are often intertwined. If you don't want cable and phone companies to tell you which Web sites you can visit, then you might appreciate Lawrence Lessig's post from last year--Broadband Wars I and Broadband Wars II. One way or another, the issue of Webs site choice will remain with us for a long time. In this case, surrealistically enough, Netfolks' interests would actually seem to overlap at least somewhat with those of Disney and Microsoft. Simply for business reasons, nothing else, they don't want the Verizons and Comcasts to limit our surfing options. In spirit all the companies mentioned are Tories who value money over our freedom. No evil conspiracies here, just bottom lines first, along with the usual control fixations.

Issues like Web choice are one reason for the establishment of a well-stocked national digital library system in the TeleRead vein, which would be harder than ever for cable companies and other powerful ISPs to block. Do we really want cable systems to favor Random House or Simon & Schuster, say, over an independent publisher's site? I doubt that would happen--I'd hope that the entertainment conglomerates themselves would be sensible enough to understand the downside here. But, given the risks if Verizon and the like controlled our Web choices, it's high time for both a well-stocked national digital library system and appropriate regulations to help discourage such a nightmare. Already Verizon tries to limit our email choices. What's more, even today, you can't set up your AOL account to include a return address without the aol.com (unless you go to the bother of using an auxiliary email program and a server elsewhere via TCP/IP).

Meanwhile we can all hope that a long-range, sophisticated version of Wi-Fi or a successor will eventually free broadband users and small broadband providers from direct or indirect dependence on the large phone and cable companies to reach homes and businesses. But don't count on it. Remember, Wi-Fi and the like exist at the mercy of the FCC--which, like all regulators, can be a most political creature and open to the influence of well-bought congress members. Few beat the telcoms at that game.

Alas, the Broadband Wars are just one area of concern for freedom-minded surfers. The library filtering controversy goes on; and, if we don't thwart the censors now, the same threats could extend to the Net at large, beyond libraries. Likewise copyright controversies continue--with, you guessed it, the usual Tories as the villains: Disney and friends. A Hollywood-bought Congress has let the greedsters pillage the public domain, the Supreme Court has failed to provide relief, and that issue could well be with us for years--in fact, eternally. Given the reliance of democracy on a well-informed citizenry, Draconian copyright laws and especially term-extensions are an insult to the memories of Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and the other signers of the Declaration of Independence. In the aggregate, Washington's mean-spirited words are a reverse Declaration--or maybe a new Stamp Act: vanity law for America's greedy Hollywood elite. Whether you're a citizen of the United States or not, even if you're reading this in Iraq, those matters should be of interest to you in an era of corporate dominance across borders.

(Painting--of the signing of the Declaration of Independence--is by John Turnbull. Parade photo via ArtToday. Copy of the Declaration via the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.)

posted by David Rothman at 2:35 PM | permanent link

Gasp! The U.S. Congress is about to encourage the Open eBook Forum to do the right thing and adopt a universal consumer e-book format based on OeBF-developed production standards. This mini-miracle is just that--rather mini, and rather accidental, too. But it still will help the cause.

So what's happened? Well, Congress is about to update the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and tucked into the act is a proposal for a "National File Format" (NFF). That term is a tad misleading. No, Section 613 is not saying, "Hey, this is the format publishers must use for the general consumer." Instead NFF is actually a production document format specifically for the needs of the accessibility community. Within two years of the Act's reauthorization, textbook publishers must supply all K-12 textbooks in that format to disability-related organizations such as Recording for the Blind and Dyslexic (RFB&D). From there, the groups will process the material into synthesized speech, Braille and whatever else is appropriate to aid accessibility to the content.

But does an OeBF angle exist here? Yes, big time. Turns out that the U.S. Department of Education, which will carry out Section 613, already has been acting on its own. Late last year it funded CAST to create and oversee the "NFF Technical Panel" to develop the NFF document specification. This panel is loaded with familiar names in the OeBF such as Microsoft and McGraw-Hill, along with disability-related organizations such as the Daisy Consortium, RFB&D, the American Foundation for the Blind, and, yes, CAST. Overlapping names by themselves don't mean much. But here, they do. As a starting point, the panel appears likely to recommend using the Digital Talking Book (DTBook) specification for document markup, which just happens to work very well within the Open eBook Publication Structure Specification. Jon Noring, a leading OEBPS format guru, who, like me, has been fighting for a consumer-level standard for e-books, is ecstatic.

"DTBook is overall a better vocabulary for marking up books than the basic default vocabulary that the Open eBook Publication Structure provides for general use," Jon emailed me. "The Basic OEBPS vocabulary is based on XHTML, which is fine and dandy, and can produce great results when used properly. But OEBPS is extensible and allows other and better book-oriented markup vocabularies, including DTBook. This means that when publishers produce mandated NFF-conforming documents based on DTBook, it will be trivial for them to produce, in parallel, quite high-quality OEBPS Publication versions of them, ready for both direct distribution and for conversion into other e-book formats as needed in the publishing workflow. In essence, the NFF, when enacted (and in my estimation it appears it will be enacted, but one never knows of course), will make OEBPS much more attractive in not one, but two ways. And the OEBPS thus produced will have the added benefit that DTBook-aware text-to-speech engines will be able to aurally deliver the content to the end-user with a presentation quality difficult to achieve with XHTML-based markup."

So, courtesy of the Feds, publishers will be more inclined to use a special e-book vocabulary picking up elements from, yes, DTBook. Indirectly Washington will have made OeBPS more useful than ever as a production and distribution format. Consider textbooks, which are more complex than novels and most other works. The default XHTML vocabulary is not as helpful as DTBook in, say, specifying a document's logical structure (such as indicating subchapters in a "universal" way.) Now, thanks to the Feds, the OeBF members will be encouraged to use these standardized specs. Result? More common use of OEBPS at the production level--and of course a somewhat greater possibility that the specs will end up at the consumer level.

Again, keep mind this is just a small step toward standardization nirvana. For example, the OeBF will still have to grapple with issues such as the need for a standardized "wrapper" (to include not just the actual document but other elements such as graphics). And then there is the pesky matter of coming up with a nonproprietary scheme for Digital Rights Management, which a consumer-level standard will also require. So, yes, the fight is a long way from over. Meanwhile, however, it is a positive that the Association of American Publishers, a key OeBF member, has endorsed the relevant provision of the disability-related legislation now in House and Senate committees.
posted by David Rothman at 12:36 AM | permanent link

"Photography company Corbis Corp. is suing Amazon.com (among others) for copyright infringement and violation of the DMCA; it is seeking damages and injunctive relief. Corbis holds the copyright for a variety of celebrity photographs and does business by licensing these images to its customers." - Yale LawMeme.

The TeleRead take: Keep it up, Corbis! This is a great way of encouraging Congress to go back to the drawing board on the DMCA.
posted by David Rothman at 2:20 PM | permanent link

Spurred on by the complexities of Digital Rights Management, Microsoft is updating its Reader software. More hassles for users. Wouldn't it be great if nonproprietary format and DRM standards existed, along with better communications between vendors and publishers, and Microsoft had gotten things right in the first place?
posted by David Rothman at 12:04 PM | permanent link

Own a Gemstar 1100 or 1150? Do you want a graceful way to load up e-books from HTML, ASCII or other formats that SEC target Henry Yuen and the other Gemstar greedsters wanted you to shun--in favor of their overpriced content?

Well, an annoyed Gemstar owner has come up with a way of doing this. Steve Breen will soon release a try-before-you-buy $30 program, and you can sign up now for notification.

He'll start out with the 1150 in mind (the program won't do .rb files) and move on from there. Gemstar itself has announced a Web-based file conversion service, but it almost surely will be more clumsy to use than the Breen program.

Meanwhile, on our 1100, Carly and I are using a mix of the old Rocket eBook software (for translating formats) and a Gemstar-provided Librarian program (which works with the 1100's USB port). Be great to consolidate everything with one package. Nice going, Steve!

Kind of related: Won't someone buy up rights to the hardware design and free the machines of the restrictions that the greedsters inflicted on them?
posted by David Rothman at 11:38 AM | permanent link

Here's a new term for you--stogware, which blights DVD movie technology now and could hurt e-books in the future, when multimedia counts more.

This neologism, which I'll define in a moment, came to mind when I was trying to play the DVD of Boiler Room, a film about stock-market crooks. Hollywood itself committed a crime against me. The DVD refused to run on on my Dell Optiplex unless I installed a program called PCFriendly. Orwell Land here. This "Friendly" program wasted half an hour of my time, perhaps because I preferred for my firewall to block the software's path to and from the Net. Also, once I installed PCFriendly, my computer couldn't load DVDs as quickly. Drat. My Dell had already come with a good DVD player. But thanks to proprietary encryption schemes, apparently, Hollywood wanted me to waste my hard disk space with a second program. Worse, to be able to play another DVD, I'd already installed InterActual Player, the successor to PCFriendly.

I uninstalled PCHostile and somehow managed to see Boiler Room with the RealOne player, at least after I'd selectively disabled the firewall; but the bad taste lingered. No telling what the greedsters--an apt term, considering that an AOL Time Warner offshoot released the film--had in mind for the innards of my machine. A little stealth here? Privacy-invading programs? At the same time, PCFriendly was taking up 10 megs on my drive if I recall correctly. Combine "stealthy" with "hoggish" and you come up with the term "stogware." That's, ugh, PCFriendly.

Meanwhile, aided by Silicon Valley, the assault on users' present and future machines continues. A Safer System for Home PC's Feels Like Jail to Some Critics is the New York Times' headline over John Markoff's piece on the sleazy "trusted computing initiative." You might think of secure computing as a form of slogware. It'll gobble up computing resources, cripple our machines and along the way be damn stealthy.

The irony is that our jailers, America's stogware promoters, are far from squeaky-clean. Check out the Washington Post's review of When Hollywood Had a King: The Reign of Lew Wasserman, Who Leveraged Talent Into Power and Influence, by Connie Bruck. Reviewer John Anderson, Newsday's chief film critic, says that the late Wasserman "laid waste to a promising infant medium (television) and ensnared politicians of both parties in the film industry web (his legacy includes TV reruns, a performer's participation in profits and arch-lobbyist Jack Valenti). Sidney Korshak, the Man Who Was Al Capone's Lawyer, hardly needs much more of an introduction. Suffice to say, he did a lot of the dirty work, albeit without getting his own hands dirty." The sleaze, as exemplifed by the massive campaign contributions that gave us the DMCA and resulted in Hollywood's increased ability to bully Silicon Valley, continues--setting the stage for DC-blessed stogware.

One of the best antidotes for stogware threat, of course, besides a less buyable Congress, would open, nonproprietary standards for books and movies alike.
posted by David Rothman at 4:55 AM | permanent link