Sophie would be great if it were based on HTML. As it is not it will be simply another not well supported format. Although Sophie project and format is quite interesting, it is not the format to choose for real world projects.

re: .epub
thanks for correcting me re: plugins.
What about JavaScript? I still feel /epub is only taking away from what we already have on the web and not adding much more.

re: device support for Sophie
I agree, we tatally need a good handheld/pocket whatever. I like the iPhone but I think its screen is too small for reading.
eInk suffers frrom the fact that devices are “too dedicated”
I can imagine Sophie running or more laptop lik devices where it will be “just another app”.
Could even be ported to the iphone

re: “But why that over a good *website*?”
Excellent question.
I’d prefer if Sophie provided the same easy of use for authoring but supported web formats such as HTML for text instead of RTF. The output could also be a website. It will be interesting to see if their document and container format catches on.
Keep in mind it’s version 1.0… there’s a long way to go
and it’s free and open source… so there’ll always be someone to pick it up from where others left of and improve it further.

As for the claim that current E ink devices “Have slow CPUs - no interactivity”, this is partially false. The no interactivity that Tamas complains about is due to the slow screen refresh of current E ink screens, as well as the fact that most E ink devices do not have a touch-screen. The CPUs in these devices are actually the same ones used in many modern PDAs. These same PDAs are interactive, surf the web and play video. They just have faster, color screens that are touch sensitive.

I’m sure that projects like Sophie will find some use. Tamas is obviously a fan. For me, the biggest drawback to software like Sophie is the very fact that it REQUIRES an internet connection. I don’t want my reading restricted only to areas where I can get an internet connection. I want to be able to carry some content with me and use it anywhere. I also don’t like this “always on” requirement for another reason–this puts you at the mercy of the content provider to impose restrictions, additional fees, DRM, etc. And what if that content provider disappears?

Microsoft, Google and others are already offering “live” word processing, spreadsheet, etc. software on the net. How am I going to write a letter when I can’t connect to the net? The same applies to Sophie.

Perhaps it’d be great for reference. But why that over a good *website*?

E-ink is a technology caught between proprietary interests–such things move at a snail’s pace. The web is open, it’s evolving fast, and .epub adopts some of its best practices and technologies. That said, David is right that .epub does very little to resolve the problem of interbook linking, and nothing at all to address the more crucial problem of how to deep-link, or point at arbitrary chunks of text. That turns out to be an achilles heel for .epub, because it’s at the heart of all annotation and linking proposals.

Finally, on the matter of multimedia: it’s up to authors to keep it from being distracting. Don’t blame developers for allowing it to happen!

Aaron

.epub can and will support rich media thanks to the way OPF is designed: you can embed whatever you want as long as you define a proper fallback.

Adobe is already advertising the fact that you can use Flash to create interactive documents. But .epub could also use any other technology, like Microsoft’s Silverlight for example. You’ll just need proper support on your reading system… Right now, they already defined supported vocabularies and image formats, but a next generation of the standard could also add recommended support for music and video.

Unfortunately, I still see little use for this project in most of what I read - fiction. Granted such features may be great in an academic book, certainly it would be an improvement to have video in some science books. It would also be useful to have a connected forum if several students are assigned a group project on a passage from a book. In general, however, I do not understand the need or desire for reading the notes and comments of other readers during a story. Reading a review before deciding on a book is very different, but once I start reading, I prefer to form my own opinions. It is getting to seem like people cannot decide what they like until they hear from the crowd.

As for the extra features, an occasional illustration is one thing, and often adds to a book, but most of this goes far beyond. Frankly, the extra features offered here remind me of the early web sites where many people thought that lots of music and animated GIFs made for great site design. Usually it was simply over-produced and distracting. Today, while I do most of my reading online, I know which sites allow me to set the environment the way I want it. At other sites, I download the story and open it in a simple reader (generally, Tofu) where I can adjust the experience to my preferences.

Sophie will be of great use in specific books and genres, but I sadly expect that, if it catches on, it will spread beyond that.

Jack

What I find most intriguing about something like Sophie is the potential to have copyrighted, even (ugh) DRM’s books that have the capability of being annotated by students. Your notes and reflections would be stored in a separate linked file that would not touch the root drm’d file. In other words, part of the Sophie-book would be editable (the notes and annotations you add) and part would not be (the textbook).

Having only explored the Sophie reader, not the bookmaker, I don’t know if Sophie allows for that kind of thing. I don’t know if epub does either.

I agree with David that for novels, Sophie adds little; html would include everything needed, including illustrations.

But for textbooks, the full-on multimedia capabilities would be wonderful for science books, with video clips of experiments; history books, with video clips of famous events, speeches, etc; anthropology books, with video clips of representatives of all people in the world looking at you and saying ‘hello’ in their native tongue; language books with audio clips and video clips of native speakers rehearsing practice dialogues so students can hear the full lines as they are commonly pronounced — etc.

ePublications such as magazines and newspapers, in Sophie editions, would also steal a march on their televised competition.

Bands could release music videos in Sophie editions with liner notes, lyrics, links to the bands’ websites, and so forth.

All this is very exciting. Now, most of the ebooks I read are Project Gutenberg oldies, and text-only, and for such I’d prefer a small device with good readability; Sophie editions would give me a few additions (such as being able to note where a scanno shows up in a PG book) but would, I think, not be worthwhile on the whole to me. But I can see lots of situations where Sophie on a nettop tablet would be a tremendous step forward.