...check out the Open Standards Alliance and a blog post by Andy O'Reilly, an O'Reilly editor. I continue to be amused by the spin that PDF defenders are giving the standards debate. If PDF is true standard, why is it necessary to have PDF/A as a proposed archival standard? Too bad PDF/A isn't XML-based like Open Reader, but despite the antiquated approach, it's at least an honest standards-creation effort.

But back to the Open Standards Alliance. OpenReader's Jon Noring has noted a quote on the OSA home page from Larry Rosen of RosenLaw.com:

The next big battleground between the Open Source and proprietary software communities will be in the area of Open Standards. You need Open Standards to implement Open Source. However this need not be a battle.

I won't risk violating the DMCA, but minus all the details, I'll give you a clue of the hassles that can arise when trying to back up old Rocket eBook content. The info below is from a member of the eBook Community list in reply to an earlier complaint about the .rb format.

Actually, .RB was one of the safer formats.

If I recall correctly (it's been a while since I used the smaller '1100 - my aging eyes much prefer the wider screen of the '1200)... you can look on certain Russian sites for the rebtalk package, and there was another program which extracted all the books from the reb1100 -- this was released just before/just after Gemstar announced their exit from the ebook business, so as far as I know, no updates to the reb1100 firmware exist.

Once you've done that, you get "rbmake" and there's an "rbburst" program (?) which would give you tolerable HTML for the whole thing.

Run HTMLTIDY, Jury-rig up a OEBPS complient opf file, and convert it to the reader of your choice.

Now if only I could get my .RES/.IMP purchases back into HTML....

E-books, I'd hope, will be among the topics of a library conference at Dartmouth called Beyond the Building: Taking the Library to Our Users. Let's see more thinking like this, and not just in academic environments. Here is what a clueful acquaintance of mine wrote the other day:

I grew up in Mount Pleasant, a DC neighborhood that used to be filled with working-class blacks and immigrant and refugee Central Americans. We had 1 local library (with mostly English books), and I spent countless hours there as a child to supplement my Catholic school library. Looking at it now, I'm shocked at how something so small made such a huge impact on my life and fostered an unquenchable thirst for reading (which has clearly, positively impacted my life in many great ways).

I spent the last 8 years in Harlem before joining One Economy and I'm shocked at how small and inaccessible local libraries are in that area, and in many other urban neighborhoods across the country. As an editor, journalist, and researcher, I rely heavily on library resources for professional and personal reasons. All of the citywide NYC branches, but particularly in areas like Harlem, have seriously cut back hours over the years because of budget reasons. They're only open during business hours and not every day; they're mostly closed on Saturdays; they're all closed on Sundays. I know this issue isn't unique to Harlem - it reflects a national pattern of education-related cutbacks, specifically in urban, economically depressed areas.

TeleRead is not a replacement for local libraries. In fact, in the future, by supplying e-books and making libraries more efficient with less spent on shelving and the like, a well-stocked national digital library system might help avoid such avoid such closings. Meanwhile an story from elpassotimes.com, serves as a warning of the need to care about libraries in the here and now.

500 students, parents, educators and others...gathered Tuesday evening in opposition to the El Paso County Commissioners Court's plans to close the library because of a $20 million budget shortfall.

"It's a very homey library," said [Yvonne] Palacio, who with her girls, ages 7 and 2, each week visits the library she first attended as a kindergartner. "You go in, they know you. They know your kids.... It's a community gathering place."

The library's future was still uncertain after the meeting in the Fabens Middle School cafeteria. The meeting was sponsored by the El Paso Libraries Consortium. The Fabens library, the county's only library, is about 25 miles east of the closest public library in El Paso, which was named the least literate city in the nation in a recent national ranking.

County Commissioners Miguel Teran and Betti Flores said they would support funding the library. But Commissioner Dan Haggerty was met with a flood of boos when he said he would make no guarantee.

The five-member Commissioners Court will discuss the county budget in coming weeks, including a public hearing about the county tax rate at 5:30 p.m. Sept. 13 at the El Paso County Courthouse.

The library is a nonmandated county function, and the county would save $250,000 if it closed, officials said.

"I'm not going guarantee to vote to raise taxes as long as there are things on the table that we can cut," Haggerty said.

"Everybody wants services but nobody wants to pay for it," he said after the meeting. But the library is needed, said Fabens residents, including senior citizens and teenagers in rock T-shirts.

"We wouldn't have anywhere to go to do homework or use the Internet" if the library closed, 15-year-old Karina Cacho said..

Shouldn't you be able to buy e-books for real--and be able to display the books on different machines or make useful backups without violating the DMCA?

This isn't mere talk. Maybe Jack Valenti would argue otherwise, but just tell that to Daniel P. Smith, a veteran member of the eBook Community list who bought hundreds of dollars of content keyed to just one machine. And guess what? It recently went on the blink and soon may be kaput for keeps. Here's what Daniel Smith wrote to someone curious about the popularity of various DRMed formats.

Just for the record: the Rocket eBook/Gemstar .rb is very, very unpopular with this member of the reading public due to the fact that it was proprietary, and the proprietor elected to go out of the eBook business.

A month ago, my eBook device suddenly said something about file corruption and stopped working. I pushed the "reset" key, reinstalled the firmware updates, and reinstalled my books and everything seems fine, but I can see the handwriting on the wall. If this device ever fails, I believe that the chances of getting access to the $500-odd worth of books I've bought for it--at the same prices as dead-tree versions--are essentially zilch, as they're keyed to the hardware serial number of the device.

The stuff people say about DRM and proprietary formats is not theoretical. It can happen and it basically has happened to me. My eBooks, which cost exactly as much as the dead-tree equivalents, appear to have had a useful life of about five years.

I am not going to touch DRMed stuff again with a five-foot pole, no matter how attractive or nicely engineered the reading device is, unless the DRM is as deliberately porous as Apple's Fairplay. I do use Apple's iTunes music store, but I burn all my purchased music to audio CD's (i.e. a standard, unencrypted format) so I'm not likely to run into the same issue there (unless the music industry manages to effectively kill off availability of devices that can play standard CD's).

How long until the myths about e-book formats die? One old canard is that Adobe's PDF format is nonproprietary. Not so. And other forms of confusion and corpo-spin abound, including variants of the Adobe myth.

The other day on the eBookCommunity list, a techie who should know better said: "Sure, PDF is controlled by a corporation, but so is XHTML, and so is Unicode." They're all "proprietary," he wrote. Adobe is for profit and the W3C Consortium and Unicode Consortium are not, but he said the end user should not care. Mistake. Big mistake.

The actual facts

Here, slightly edited, is a reply from Jon Noring, moderator of the eBook list and director of the OpenReader Consortium, of which I'm a cofounder:

...With regards to "corporations," this legal construct covers a whole gamut of entities: for-profit companies, non-profit foundations, trade organizations, city governments, etc. Even the U.S. Postal Service is a Federal Corporation. Adobe is a directed, for-profit, public company, beholden to its shareholders. Its goals are driven by profit--it makes decisions based on what maximizes its profits, both for the short-term and for the long-term.

Non-profit and trade-type organizations, such as W3C and the Unicode Consortium, even though they are incorporated under the same laws as is Adobe, are organized and governed quite differently (some even acquire non-profit status such as IRS 501(c)3 in the U.S.) They are beholden to quite different constituencies, and for quite different goals and purposes. That they may support the goals of for-profit corporations does not make their goals and purposes the same as those of individual for-profit corporations like Adobe.

The differences in goals and purposes are important when we discuss ebook format standards. Without going into it further, there are profound long-term civil liberties issues with regards to ebook and other multimedia formats since these formats are the vehicles by which society's collective thoughts and ideas (both past and present), necessary to the maintenance of our freedoms and to encourage social progress, are transmitted and preserved for future generations.

This is one reason I take the topic of open standards very seriously since I look at the bigger picture of both the free flow and long-term preservation of information. From this perspective, things do look a whole lot different than just focusing on the flash and splash of the immediate (promulgated by the "fast buck," for-profit 800 pound gorillas we all have come to know and love).

Here's a job for the DNA experts. Can you take the genes from Atlantic Monthly contributor Eric Alterman, who wrote about Hollywood money without once mentioning copyright law, and combine them with those of the Hollywood Reporter journalist who has just written about the MPAA's legal initiatives while almost ignoring all those millions in campaign donations? Actually, to be exact, the Reporter piece is a Q&A with Dan Glickman, the incoming boss of the MPAA, shown here; but to a great extent it's really a copyright article in disguise.

Detail: Notice I said "almost ignoring"? Here's the full reference to money, a Glickman quote nicely couched in terms of a "bipartisan operation":

THR: There has been minor grumbling about the hiring of a Democrat for this job.

Glickman: I tend to think the best way to deal with that is to reach out. I've gone to his office and met with (Senate Republican Caucus chief of staff) Mark Rogers. We had a very nice meeting, and I've been in contact with my friends on Capitol Hill as well. I don't think these are irreconcilable problems; I intend to convince folks I (will) carry forward on the Jack Valenti bipartisan operation of this place. I've even gone to some Republican fund-raisers.

Time's slowly running out for Sony--creator of the DRM-hobbled Librie, the E-Ink-based tablet released in a test version in Japan. So far, I've heard no news of a possible U.S. Librie, hopefully with less Big Bro inside. Meanwhile Mobileread.com carries this report:

...Juicebox shows us how cool an E-Ink device can be if not manufactured by Sony. It is small (50x56x3.7mm), has a multimedia card interface, includes a MP3 decoder, and of course features the wonderful E-Ink panel. The great thing about this project is that it gives the schematic and source code (alas excluding the confidential sources for the E-Ink display) for download. Btw, the smart guy behind the project, Holly Gates, has actually worked for E-Ink since 1998. Why on earth did they make E-Ink technology exclusive for Sony until now?

Why haven't we heard more about AudioBooksForFree.com, based in Scotland? You can download free MP3 audios of dozens of classics ranging from 20,000 Leagues under the Sea to Enchanted Typewriter (a machine described in a summary as being able to "communicate with Hell"). I can't wait to see if in some way I can make this work with my Dell Axim PDA. For further details on the service, see the FAQ. At least to this sighted person, the UK site appears to be blind-friendly, with a text-only mode for screen readers. Perhaps David Faucheux can add his thoughts.

How long it'll take: With high-speed cable modem service, I downloaded Treasure Island (9 hours of listening time) in less than ten minutes. I put all the files in one folder on my PC and let WinAmp take off--reading them without my having to pause to reload. Nice!

Details: AudioForFree.com uses human readers--skillful ones at that. For high-quality audio, you must pay extra. Fair enough. Ideally, of course, a business model can be found to make even high-quality reproductions free. AudioBooksForFree also sells CDs, DVDs and MP3 machines preloaded with recordings. Librarians and others should check out the copyright page. Alas, there are few American authors compared to UK ones, but this is, after all, a Scottish site.