No fast relief from PDF at Wowio, apparently, darn it! Bad news for lovers of free e-books—and IDPF format confusion may be among the complications
Only a few days ago I warned of the need for IDPF President Steve Potash and others to take care to separate the new IDPF e-book format from Adobe Digital Editions—developed by Adobe, one of the main supporters of the format.
Many e-reader products should to be able to read a standard format, at least without proprietary DRM to gum up the works. And ideally the IDPF will address the proprietary DRM problem as well.
Now, alas, as shown by the screenshot at the end of this post, Wikipedia gives the erroneous impression that the format’s .epub extension is proprietary. So I can hardly blame Gerry Manacsa, one of the main brains behind the Wowio site, for sharing the confusion or at least not sufficiently distinguishing the format from software possibilities. Gerry tells us, furthermore, that he actually likes Digital Editions less than he does the existing Adobe Reader.
The bottom line at Wowio
And that’s one of the reasons Gerry hopes that Wowio for now will stick to the existing PDF format. He’s speaking strictly for himself, not Wowio, but considering his job, I’m not exactly getting my hopes up that Wowio will offer a PDF alternative soon. May I be wrong! I love Wowio’s mission of providing free, ad-supported books but would rather not have to bother with importing PDFs into Mobipocket Desktop. I’m now reading a free Wowio-posted book called Pirates: An Illustrated History and concluding that the RIAA would love it—given its depiction of some pirates as pure sadists (humor alert).
Just so Gerry knows, he’d do well to keep an eye on OSoft’s dotReader (people at OSoft are keen to do ad-supported books), Mobipocket (supposed to support the IDPF format fully in the near future) and the off-line capabilities of Bookglutton.
For conspiracy theorists: Gerry’s wife, Karina, who’s made some intelligent comments to the TeleBlog on the promise of e-books for recreational reading, hopes to be writing soon for us. I hadn’t any idea of her relationship with Gerry when I recruited her. She alerted me to the connection and says she’ll avoid Wowio-related postings. Among Karina’s early posts will be one I requested on e-books use for K-12 in the Philippines.
And now–a screenshot of the item that the Wikipedia needs to rewrite: See for yourself.
July 6th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
The “conspiracy theorists” bit made me smile and chuckle, too, this morning. Will be happy to share some thoughts when possible. Have a good weekend.
ps: What about iSilo readers?
July 6th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Hi, Karina. As gung-ho as I personally am about a standard e-book format, it’s important for the TeleBlog to serve people in the here and now. If you have wisdom for iSilo fans or want to say good things about the software, be my guest! Looking forward to your contributions! - David
July 6th, 2007 at 3:46 pm
Thanks for the continued good analysis on the question of formats, David. I just wanted to clarify a couple of points regarding my earlier response.
I wouldn’t interpret my musings on the immaturity of other formats as an indication either way of future directions at WOWIO. Again, I do want to emphasize that I don’t speak for the company (and there are plenty of smart and talented people who make up the team, so I am just one voice among many). But naturally, we’re closely monitoring developments in this area and we’re working hard on many fronts to improve our customers’ experience.
Digital Editions is an interesting piece of software, and I do like the cataloging features and certain aspects of the interface. However, the performance was sluggish on my recent-model laptop, and certain Acrobat features like media playback of key formats like mpeg and mp3 are not currently supported. So for my purpose of displaying a range of content on my laptop screen, Reader is still a better choice.
As for .epub/IDPF… while the format is clearly a separate entity, Digital Editions is one of the first mainstream platforms on which to read documents in that format, so it becomes a de facto means of evaluating the format’s performance today.
Thanks!
Gerry
July 6th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Gerry: Big thanks for your additional thoughts. While it’s clear that Wowio won’t be replacing or supplementing PDF in the very near term, just as I wrote, it’s wonderful that you’re looking ahead.
As for Digital Editions, I’ll very respectfully disagree. Text is the main show at Wowio, and DE, while in need of improvement, is a step up from the usual Adobe Reader. Of course, with the IDPF’s standards initiative, let’s hope there will soon be a number of choices.
Once again, thanks. And I’ll join you in reminding readers that you don’t speak officially for Wowio, which, by the way, deserves plenty of credit for letting you blog. I think that both you and Wowio will be rewarded with useful feedback from people. I’ll do my best to help.
David
July 8th, 2007 at 1:05 am
[...] Fortunately, the reader software does offer some help. Acrobat Reader’s full-screen mode is like the visual equivalent of a quiet room where I can find some measure of stillness, away from the self-imposed cacophony. It blacks out all of the other windows and interface elements, providing a pure and focused view on the book page (see below). Digital Editions, the new Adobe ebook reader favored by some, offers a similar (though slightly noisier) experience. [...]
August 4th, 2007 at 1:42 am
David - I entirely agree with you that it is a mistake to characterize EPUB as an Adobe format. In addition to being wrong about EPUB, the entry makes it sound like XHTML support is something different, when it is only supported via EPUB. Adobe may have compounded this in our product info - there had been some question as to whether the IDPF-blessed marketing name woudl be EPUB, OPS, OEBPS 2.0, or something else so we just punted and went with “XHTML-based” for now.
But hey - you don’t need to write a blog post to complain that a Wiki contains inaccuracies. Dude, it’s a Wiki, so just fix it, eh? It’s not like this wikipedia entry came from an authorized source - AFAIK no one at Adobe had anything do with it.
BTW relative to liking Reader or Digital Editions better for PDF - I think it’s apples and oranges. Adobe Reader is a very mature piece of software and has many capabilities that Adobe Digital Editions does not and likely never will have, that are important to knowledge workers in enterprises who use Reader for all kinds of paper-replacement workflows. Review & markup annotations for document review, non-repudiable digital signatures for contract authorization, object metadata for CAD, etc. It is essentially a free version of Acrobat, minus creation and some editing capabilities. For eBooks and other commercial digital publications we think Digital Editions is going to quickly become the preferred solution because of its lighter-weight and more reading-optimized implementation, and we no longer support eBook DRM in Acrobat/Reader as of version 8.0. But if someone prefers to view an unprotected PDF eBook in Acrobat/Reader, that’s fine. And for all other kinds of PDFs and uses thereof, Reader is probably still the right choice: Digital Editions doesn’t even register the .pdf file extension or browser MIME type.
Also, there are some specific issues with Digital Editions 1.0 relative to font rendering quality, image rendering quality/performance in certain circumstances, and a few other things. We think it’s a pretty good “1.0″, but are already working to update the software on an aggressive schedule. I hope anyone who may find Digital Editions less than ideal for PDF eBooks will find our planned improvements to their liking. We expect both EPUB and PDF publications to be widely utilized and we want to make Digital Editions a great experience across the board.
August 4th, 2007 at 3:11 am
Bill: Many thanks for joining me in making it clear that .epub is not a proprietary standard. I’ve just changed the Wikipedia item and pointed to your statement above. Best of luck with improvements in DE’s font-rendering capabilities. Meanwhile I hope that companies such as Wowio will switch over to DE and/or other .epub-supporting clients as soon as practical, given .epub’s reflowable format, which makes it much easier to read on PDAs, a major platform for recreational reading. I’m an enthusiastic Wowio user who’s thinking, “The sooner, the better.” Thanks. David