CATHERINE

Many thanks for your reply. I find it fascinating that your retail e-book site has so aggressively promoted dotReader despite your apparent denial that your family has a business interest in the product. Are you certain that dotReader-specific capabilities aren’t part of your biz plans, especially with Jon involved as your father’s biztechdev guy?

As for “interest” in a more basic sense, I have reproduced the screenshot of the now-deleted promo from the store’s home page. Text read: “DPPSTORE is bringing you innovative fiction and non-fiction in this exciting new format…new in dotReader.” And a DigitalPulp news release even used the word “standard” in an OSoft context: “OSoft’s vision is to create a documentation standard through which publishers, authors, potential authors, and readers can share, collaborate, and exchange information in one common format.”

Catherine, has your site given other “formats,” “standards,” whatever, the same amount of loving attention lately? And why did the super-conspicuous dotReader promo vanish from DPPSTORE’s home page not long after I complained of Jon’s connection with your family? You’re nice people. It’s just that Jon’s new arrangement with your father reduces his detachment in the e-book standards world and his ability to safeguard the integrity of OpenReader.

As for precise corporate jobs, let’s just say: “All in the family.” Since you welcome “research” and have raised “who’s who doing what?” kinds of issues, however, perhaps you can reveal:

1. Jon’s exact relations with the various corporate arms of your family, and who runs those arms.

2. When the relationships started.

3. The financial arrangements.What are the sums and percentages already paid and/or agreed to?

If you and Jon don’t want this on record, for privacy reasons, sure, I’ll understand. But I’m extending the invitation.

Regarding your claim that there has been “no attack on OpenReader, except by you”–well, that would be news to the skeptics. Bill McCoy at the very least raised many questions, albeit more politely than I am. Bowerbird called OpenReader vaporware.

Because of my friendship with Jon and his past credibility, not to mention detailed progress reports from OSoft, I was willing to keep on evangelizing for OpenReader. But when he repeatedly failed to press aggressively enough for OSoft to keep its promises, when OpenReader creation-related activities and rendering capabilities became such small details in OSoft’s plans, and when Jon became a dev guy for David Cote, how could I have not joined the skeptics? I know. Software dev is full of uncertainties. But Mark so far hasn’t even given the standard an “OpenReader’s coming” logo on the home pages of dotReader and OSoft. Read on for why I didn’t insist on a logo all along.

Meanwhile I find it interesting that just about the only people defending OpenReader in a major, persistent way in the TeleBlog are you and Jon—joined by OSoft CEO Mark Carey (with Bill McCoy graciously cutting OpenReader some slack). Perhaps I’m forgetting some people, or other supporters will come out of the woodwork.

MARK

My requests for an OpenReader logo on your home pages began late last year, at least several weeks ago; and in fact you said you’d do one. But you never followed through.

Earlier I was so confident of OSoft’s support of the standard that it didn’t really occur to me to press you on these details. Your company represented itself as more than a little gung ho . See above for why I eventually became skeptical about OpenReader becoming a reality in a timely way. Meanwhile the proprietary dotReader “format” will have a head start.

The confusing language on your dotReader site has not helped, either, and I can understand why even sophisticated techies would feel that dotReader would be OpenReader-capable out of the gate. I know what you meant in the paragraph below, which might even be technically correct; but many a casual reader won’t pick up the nuances:

“The dotReader can convert and render any reasonably structured (non-encrypted) XML document with the appropriate plug-in. What does this mean? We are developing conversion tools that can make a dotReader publication from other document types. We are currently able to convert the OpenReader format, Open Office, many .LIT, and most Mobipocket formatted books. The upcoming beta release will actually contain books that originated in some of these (non-encrypted) formats that were converted into XHTML and rendered in dotReader.”

Notice? “The dotReader can convert and render…” And then three sentences later: “We are currently able to convert the OpenReader format…” So what’s meant by “convert”? Is it happening in the dotReader itself at the moment? No—because a plug-in doesn’t exist. Do you mean a conversion tool? Hand coding? Mark, you’re a very talented guy, and you can write persuasive, factual and clear copy, so I’m disappointed that such misleading gobbledygook went on your site.

I hope it’s obvious now why I’m not happy with either OpenReader or OSoft. Unless I felt that OpenReader had problems well worth airing, just why the devil would I be so public in disagreeing with you and Jon? This isn’t fun for me, either. But I promised publishers and the rest of the world that ThoutReader/dotReader would be linked to an open standard, and if Jon wants to go ahead with the OpenReader standard, then he has major problems to address. The Noring quote in the section ahead does not build much confidence in Jon’s ability to execute standards in a by-the-book way. He’s great as consultant, and I hope that the IDPF will pay plenty of attention to his plea for durable standards, just so they consider his ambitious plans for DigitalPulp and recognize that he is no longer so disinterested. Play to his strengths. Jon still has much to offer.

JON:

You write: “Well, OpenReader is in many respects a vision of what the next-generation reflowable ebook and digital publication format should be. So long as the vision is accomplished reasonably and practically, it doesn’t matter what nameplate it goes under, or who does it.” Wrong! If it happens as a good standard, including hopefully one from the IDPF, then I’ll be very happy. But that’s much different from it happening by way of a proprietary product like dotReader, the creation of just one company.

I’ll trust companies collectively—on standards matters—more than I’ll trust one or a few. Some people may say, “Oh, well, individual companies will eventually make their technology open source, etc.” But I’d rather not see the public forced to rely so much on faith. We go back to the small pond/big pond argument that I used against the IDPF vs. a major OASIS-style effort bring in techies from number of companies. Same applies to OpenReader. While I’m still highly skeptical of the IDPF, I’m even more skeptical of OpenReader—a much smaller pond, with a standard-setting committee of one who happens to be a biztechdev guy for David Cote.

I’m touched by your faith in David C and OSoft, however. This is why it’s hard for me to figure out your motives. I’d hope you were simply being naïve. OSoft and David may mean well, for all I know, but they are profit-driven and not to be confused with philanthropies.

Meanwhile I see a lesson for publishers, nonprofits and others dealing with standards organizations–big and small. Vet them to the hilt and don’t accept “nonproprietary standards” from small groups without a lot of study—not just of the technology but of the business relationships involved. Publishers, nonprofits and others may actually want to go with proprietary standards, regardless of major negatives, instead of problematic solutions from tiny OpenReader-style groups. At least the devils are known. Within the e-book world, of course, nonproprietary HTML-style approaches would be great when appropriate.

As for betraying personal relationships, I hope the OpenReader affair sends a message to anyone with whom I’ll dealing in the future. I’ll value integrity over cronyism. If people want me to bend the rules or go back on my promises—such as the one I gave to the publishers that OpenReader would not just be another occupant of the Tower of eBabel—then count me out.

Thanks,
David

Genene Miller Coté is not simply David Coté’s wife who “presides over DPPstore,” she is the CEO of DigitalPulp Publishing.

Your continued attacks at David are misplaced. If you’d like to vilify someone… make sure you’ve done your research first.

There has been no attack on OpenReader, except by you. DPP is a proponent of well-formed standards for eBook creation. However, DPPstore, a retail site, has no interest in promoting ANY standard. Consumers don’t care why products work, just that they do.

-Catherine Hodge, Daughter of “David Coté”, also known as CTO for DigitalPulp Publishing.

Doing so will probably catapult TeleRead to the next level in being the place for ebook and digital publishing information. And from there, the sky’s the limit.

Ultimately, our goal is to meet the real needs of the users of digital publications — they are our customer. They don’t care about names, but rather function.

I also want to say that I have not enjoyed continuing this conversation, and do not intend to continue it unless there are new accusations. But, I continued to comment to unambiguously note for the public record (since the blog articles plus the associated commentaries will likely be archived at Google and elsewhere for a very long time) that there are two sides to this story (and really 3 or 4 when we include OSoft and DPP).

I saw my integrity being impugned, as were OSoft’s and DPP’s. So when other interested parties in the future come across these published comments by all sides, they will see all points of view and decide for themselves the truth of the matter, as well as assess the integrities of the various involved individuals. Some will study this exchange in order to help answer the question: “Can I work with, and trust, so-and-so?”

You stated:

" if Mark still believes in OpenReader, then he needs to put the “OpenReader coming” logo on the home pages of the OSoft sites."

The fact is, the home page of dotReader.com doesn’t mention or promote ANY format and never has from the day the site was created. It’s a dotReader website and the home page talks about the merits of the dotReader. It’s been like this for a year. You have never complained about not placing the OpenReader logo on our home page 3 months ago, six months ago, or even a year ago. Now, according to you, we have abandoned the OpenReader because we haven’t promoted the OpenReader standard on our home page.

You CAN find information about the OpenReader on the dotReader Projects page that talks about ALL our projects. You will note that on that page the OpenReader is the only format discussed. My decision not to put the OR logo on that page has to do with page aesthetics. That page was created on May 28, 2006. There were no complaints then about not placing the OpenReader logo on that page, either.

I would like to reiterate that the dotReader is a format agnostic application. We are not favoring one format over another. Any reasonable person realizes that until the reader is done we can’t promote anything. The formats currently in use for the beta are our original ThoutReader formats and are used for backward compatibility and testing.

Even your new friend Bill McCoy mentioned that OSoft is taking the right approach here when he stated:

"OSoft is doing exactly the right thing by de-emphasizing their file format (which is currently proprietary to them), and not promoting a non-starter separate dialect under an OpenReader flag. Hopefully OSoft will support EPUB in the near future."

"OSoft folks and Jon Noring, who’ve been participating in IDPF, are simply acting on this reality, and I think deserve praise, not criticism."

Bill further went on to state that it was time to move on. I think you should heed his advice. Flaming your friends and colleagues gets you nowhere. Please call me if you would like to carry out a rational, private discussion.

Mark Carey
CEO
OSoft

the OCF specification *does* say something about what’s inside it!. The spec dictates that using the .EPUB file type implies that OEBPS content is therein.

Bill, thanks for the correction here. Good job. I do hope we don’t have to write .EPUB in all caps (:-)).

Jon Noring writes:

the draft OPS 2.0 has not yet sufficiently addressed these issues, and in my opinion have actually done a few things that will make these goals a little more difficult to achieve. (Inline Islands is the nasty one that throws a monkey wrench into the works — I may post a blog article about this in the near future. It is a solution to a non-problem that few will use. Other than maybe for MathML, I see little wide-scale use of Inline Islands, and MathML can be dealt with in a better and cleaner way. Yet, like an elephant in the living room, Inline Islands requires that solutions to various problems take its presence into account.

Thanks, Jon. I’d like to see more analysis of this type, when you get the chance.

Regardless of whether your position is right or not (in my view it is not), the approach you have used (your public blog) to take out your frustrations by giving a public flogging to your friends and business associates is a breach of integrity and decency, and totally counterproductive.

Instead the DigitalPulp release, surely authorized by OSoft CEO Mark Carey, said: “OSoft’s vision is to create a documentation standard through which publishers, authors, potential authors, and readers can share, collaborate, and exchange information in one common format.” If that isn’t a diss of OpenReader, I don’t know what is. Meanwhile, if Mark still believes in OpenReader, then he needs to put the “OpenReader coming” logo on the home pages of the OSoft sites. Cost: $0. And as I keep noting, the logo could link to information giving the full details of the ETA. Standards are made by marketing, too, not just technology.

For further background, I suggest that newcomers to these matters read:

1. OpenReader as an eBabel-fighter: Three ‘musts’ if the standard is to survive Jon Noring’s new ties with DigitalPulp.”

2. OpenReader eBabel issue: Standards-harmful promo from DigitalPulp store—owned by OR leader Jon Noring’s new partner.

Jon, the longer you keep carrying water for David Cote, the clearer it is that your new job as his biztechdev guy is compromising your independence as an independent standards guy. The old Noring would have howled that OSoft, with David Cote’s help, was now playing down the standard to which it explicitly committed. I phoned publisher after publisher while linking dotReader and the OpenReader standard. That is why I’m now reminding people of the press release where OSoft swore loyalty to OpenReader.

As for OpenReader vs. alternatives, at least the IDPF has a standards-setting committee of more than one. I think your time would better be spent lobbying within the IDPF right now than being “independent.” You are doing somersaults and back flips to justify the DigitalPulp-OSoft arrangements, and the results are more sad than entertaining. It is laudable to consult closely with implementers and partners; it is not okay to let them preempt your own standard and thus undermine the essential branding for OpenReader.

Thanks,
David
(the guy who named OpenReader and dotReader as part of the thousands of dollars of services he donated to OpenReader and OSoft—with a technology for a standards-based library in mind)

As noted before, DPP had no commitment to the OpenReader Consortium at the time, so they have nothing to do with this situation. Dragging them into this discussion is therefore inappropriate, no matter how much you try to spin it differently.

And, in effect, bringing this whole thing up in public as you did a couple weeks ago (or whenever), did grave harm to the OpenReader movement (and don’t say it was already in grave condition because it wasn’t — there’s a difference between having setbacks and grave harm.) It also may have harmed OSoft, whose codebase will form the basis of an OpenReader reading system, and DPP is none too happy, either, and understandably so (although they do appreciate the free publicity and are taking this in stride.)

The result of all of this is that it has become much harder for promoting OpenReader since others, who may have been considering helping out, or simply backing OpenReader, will now have second thoughts, thinking we might viciously turn on them, too, if they don’t do everything exactly to your satisfaction and timetable. Not good.

We are building totally voluntary alliances with other organizations, not marriages. We have to remain flexible when the business environment changes for those we have built alliances with. In the voluntary open source environment we work in, we don’t demand, we negotiate in good faith and adapt as necessary. And we are nice to those who ally with us. Giving public ultimatums (as well as private ultimatums) to alliance partners works against our goals. You did the exact thing which makes OSoft not want to have anything to do with you and possibly not with OpenReader. The public flogging of OSoft, DPP and me had the direct opposite of the intended affect, and reflects negatively on you. There were several things you could have done instead that would have had a much higher probability of success and which would not have left a trail of devastation. And if none of these were successful, one shrugs the shoulders, learns from it, and moves on.

You spent countless hours with both David Cote and Genene, his wife, who presides over the DigitalPulp store. As leader of OpenReader, you had a duty to remind them of the need to promote the standard, not just dotReader. Genene refused to do so after I urged her, and, tellingly, she said Mark would need to authorize this in a dotReader context. Simply put, I think that both OSoft and your buddies at DigitalPulp let down the standard. Earlier OSoft had committed to an “Intel Inside” strategy—via the press release to which I linked—and that meant branding and many months of promo. Out of sight, out of mind.

Thanks,
David

In addition, DPP is truly an innocent bystander in all of this. Prior to my joining them a few weeks ago, they never made any promises to us vis-a-vis OpenReader. But I had been talking about it with them for some time, working up a consensus with them on standards and OpenReader — to build the bridge. Then you publicly flog them, OSoft, and me for no good reason. Smart move. What does it get you? The public reading this knows that you are really frustrated (and I understand that, OpenReader is an uphill battle in the first place, caught in all kinds of Catch-22’s), and now they also know that you don’t handle frustration very well, and will turn on your friends and business associates at the drop of a hat.

What more can I say?

That said, I continue to be disappointed that dotReader so far has been ballyhooed on the DigitalPulp retail site without mention of the OpenReader standard despite OSoft’s explicit promises to talk up the standard. I’m glad that in the aftermath of my rather public complaint, DigitalPulp at least mitigated the offense by reducing the amount of space devoted to dotReader. I’d like to think that was an acknowledgment of the problem. That hardly makes up for all damage done earlier, though.

Because of your letting OpenReader fade into the background, people are confused, and think that OSoft’s Drupal-related creation tool can do OpenReader. You yourself have admitted the problem to Tamas Simon. No dummy, he earlier put up a dotReader creation site while thinking it could do OpenReader—and while saying so on the site. He wasn’t the only one confused.

As for dev time needed for meaningful OpenReader creation and rendering, I’ve heard varying accounts. Let me go here by Eric Wilhelm’s perspective as a programmer and not expect miracles. Even if OpenReader isn’t that high up on dotReader’s list right now, and even if reality could take months, OSoft should keep its promise to promote the standard while waiting for it to happen. An “OpenReader coming” logo on the dotReader and OSoft sites would help (with a link to a page telling people the full situation–approximate ETA included, with further caveats, given the vagaries of software). I kept asking for this without results. Add that to your DigitalPulp connection as David Cote’s VP of business and tech dev, and you can see why I’m disappointed. I can’t read your mind. But I’m not happy that your buddy David C in effect dissed the standard that I spent so much time talking up in the TeleBlog and elsewhere. People really need to compare actions with the original OpenReader publicity from OSoft. You let it happen on your watch, Jon.

At this point, the most constructive thing to do would be to encourage the IDPF to include your useful ideas on the long-term integrity of standards, reliable and precise interbook linking, etc. But in terms of trusting OpenReader as an independent standard, I regret to say I cannot, at least not right now with the Consortium’s present leadership—based on the way you let OSoft/DigitalPulp overshadow the standard despite my plea not to. Please remember that marketing, not just technology, creates standards. You can bet that a savvy guy like Mark Carey knew perfectly well what he was doing when he failed to put an OpenReader logo on his home pages—and didn’t correct the omission despite my reminders.

Thanks,
David

P.S. Sure agree with you about George K for the IPDF board!

Anyway, this comment is not intended to address the “political” issues of OpenReader and OEBPS/OPS (which need discussing at the proper time/venue), but rather to provide some quick answers to other issues brought up in this comment thread.

First, to talk about some “politics” anyway.

I appreciate Bill McCoy’s comments about OpenReader and his eagerness for dialogue. I, too, share this eagerness since we both share common goals. It is true that the technical gap between OpenReader and OEBPS (or I guess the new acronym is OPS) has always been quite small since both specs are quite similar and compatible in their fundamental framework.

As everyone knows, I’ve been a contributor to the IDPF OEBPS Working Group the last year, most of the time as an invited expert. Recently my status changed and I now represent DigitalPulp Publishing, an IDPF member, as David Rothman has made sure the world knows about. DPP appreciates the free publicity!

At times I have been contentious in the OEBPS WG, and proud of it, but not for reasons of sabotaging or slowing down the spec, or because of spite, or ego, or whatever other self-serving emotional motivation some might claim.

Rather, my purpose is best described as “tough-love” — to make sure the new OEBPS spec provides continuity with the past, and that it is forward looking with respect to the future of interactivity, representing a wider range of publication types, and other goals which will benefit, first and foremost, publishers and users, and then the rest of the digital publishing stakeholders.

It has always been my interest to see a future rapport between OEBPS and OpenReader. Bill McCoy talks about forking — well, the worst fork of all is to be blind to the long-term requirements and thereby take the wrong road. Once a road is taken, it is difficult to get back on the right road, especially if we see the ebook industry explode the next few years, as many of us believe it will. For such critical specs like OEBPS/OPS and OpenReader, they have to be thoughtfully designed.

Related to this, and now to address Bill Janssen’s comment more directly (but not specifically), OpenReader, as defined by its core modular spec, the Binder Document specification, still has important innovations that are not yet introduced into OEBPS. Some of the core design goals of OpenReader were to:

1. build a stable basis for the highest level of interactivity including deep-linking into Publications (achieved),
2. represent a wide range of publication types, from purely linear to highly non-linear structures, such as web sites and topic-based representations (achieved), and
3. make it easier for publishers to repurpose their publications and minimize re-editing of file references in content documents, such as for internal links and style sheet assignments (achieved).

Unfortunately, the draft OPS 2.0 has not yet sufficiently addressed these issues, and in my opinion have actually done a few things that will make these goals a little more difficult to achieve. (Inline Islands is the nasty one that throws a monkey wrench into the works — I may post a blog article about this in the near future. It is a solution to a non-problem that few will use. Other than maybe for MathML, I see little wide-scale use of Inline Islands, and MathML can be dealt with in a better and cleaner way. Yet, like an elephant in the living room, Inline Islands requires that solutions to various problems take its presence into account.)

Hopefully OPS 2.5 or 3.0 will do the necessary fixes after proper study of the issues and assessing proposed solutions (of course, I’ll propose the OpenReader innovations, but there certainly may be other equivalent solutions.) Doing this is vitally important to the industry, but which the current OEBPS WG was not interested in doing since their focus was not future-oriented.

Joscha’s comment makes some interesting points. We tend to forget that both OPS and OpenReader are focused on the marketplace 10–15 years down the road. It took the CD audio standard, once it was released and the first equipment sold, about ten years to supplant vinyl analog sources as the dominant music delivery vehicle of the time. It will likewise take a decade for client-side reflowable formats to likewise dominate in the publication arena. (It is helped in that the Web started off with a reflowable, client-side typeset format: HTML. There is a reason why XHTML forms the basis of both OEBPS/OPS and OpenReader, although over time better vocabularies will be used.)

About OSoft’s dotReader, OSoft is working their butts off to get the core engine of their reading system working. It is still their intention to build, or spur the open source community to build, plugins for OpenReader and OPS 2.0 Publications. But they can’t build the plugins until the core is built. It’s like putting a roof on a house before the frame is even built.

As noted at the beginning of this comment, both OPS and OpenReader frameworks are quite compatible, so once a plugin is built for one, the other will naturally fall out pretty quickly. David Rothman does not fully comprehend the difficulties of software development (I do — I was involved with large collaborative programming efforts during my tenure as a staff scientist at three National Labs.)

My final comment is that direct public flogging rarely accomplishes anything positive — it only serves to make the flogger feel good for the moment, and alienates the very people one needs to meet the desired end. Now I am unnecessarily having to pick up the pieces of that public flogging. My week has been fun, to say the least. <smile/>