No Newsweek hoopla, but the main e-book standards group is quietly working toward a level playing field
While some love the idea of one humongous company offering an iPod for e-books, the main e-book standards group is quietly working toward a more level playing field.
The International Digital Publishing Forum is far from flawless, but the platforms of the current crop of board candidates suggest continued progress in standards—in fact, maybe even accelerated progress. Time for Newsweek to pay more attention to mainstream e-bookdom rather than spend so much space hyping the gadget and biz plans of the day?
Four candidates so far—for four board posts
Yes, the IDPF, which recently named Michael Smith, formerly with Harlequin, as its new director, is holding a board election. Four candidates have announced so far for four board vacancies. That’s a good number within the nine-member board.
Let me encourage candidates to use the comments section of this post to discuss their platforms and the issues if they’d like. I can then point to the comments from the main part of TeleBlog.
In alphabetical order, the announced candidates are:
–Garth Conboy (incumbent) of eBook Technologies, Inc., one of the main authors of the group’s .epub standard. He has served on key IDPF technical committees and aims for the goal of “one format” in 2008. .
–Peter Kent of DNAML, an author 50 bools who says he is keen not just on open standards but also on multimedia books. May the two areas converge! Peter has a background in, among other things, interface design.
–Bill McCoy (incumbent) of Adobe, who, correctly complains that “non-interoperable DRM [is] still dividing the market and generating undue costs for publishers and unnecessary confusion and frustration on the part of end users.”
–Jon Noring of DigitalPulp Publishing, who, as an open standards advocate, favors such specifics as reliable interbook linking and an annotations standard. Jon’s OpenReader Consortium, in which I was involved, played a leading role in reviving the IDPF’s interest in standards.
One question is whether the current board chair, Steve Potash of OverDrive, will run again. Same for member Claire Israel of Simon & Schuster.
Meanwhile the four announced candidates look promising, especially since they are all pledging to aim for meaningful standards at the consumer level.
Whoever wins, I hope that the IPDF will work closely with e-book retailers so that every store’s products can be iPod-simple to download. The IDPF model of a level playing field is endlessly more attractive than an Amazon- or Google-bossed e-book industry.
The nomination period ends Tuesday.
Technorati Tags: IDPF,International Digital Publishing Forum
December 1st, 2007 at 12:48 pm
While we’re on the subject of IDPF, there was a recent discussion on MobileRead about the purpose of epub. Some were taking the position that epub was not intended for use as a distribution format to the end user, but only as a standard for publishers to use on the backend.
I contend that epub is intended for both uses. In fact, I see its greatest impact as a final distribution format to the consumer, to provide a single, cross-platform ebook standard. It would be good if someone from IDPF would clarify this one way or the other.
December 1st, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Joseph Gray wrote:
Speaking with first-hand knowledge, having been a technical contributor since 1999 to all versions of OEBPS and the new OPS/OPF (which underlies EPub), Joseph is right.
Prior to the release of OPS/OPF 2.0, which replaced OEBPS 1.2, OEBPS was termed an “exchange format.” This was mainly, but not entirely, done for political expediency since at the time there were major players in the Open eBook Forum (OeBF, the prior name of IDPF) who did not want OeBF to advocate a particular end-user format (things have changed since then.)
However, in all our internal working group deliberations and decision-making, we certainly considered native OEBPS for use as an end-user format, in addition to it being an intermediary format (refer to the OEBPS/OPS specs and carefully read the definition of a “reading system.”)
Importantly note that, in a sense, native OEBPS has already been used for a number of years by end-users: Microsoft LIT. LIT is essentially an OEBPS 1.0.1 Publication wrapped into a proprietary container.
In summary, EPub makes an excellent e-book delivery format. Hopefully this reply will finally put to rest the misconception that EPub is not intended to be a universal reflowable e-book format.
Joseph, feel free to forward this comment to MobileRead since you’re following that particular thread.