TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘annotation’ Category

By Richard Herley

I’m re-reading Walden on paper, in the OUP “World’s Classics” edition. The editor, Stephen Fender, has provided copious notes, tagged in the text with scores of asterisks. Some of these notes are very interesting; others less so. A few are even, to an experienced reader, a bit insulting. I don’t need to be told: “Spartan-like: the ancient Spartans were noted for their simplicity, frugality, and self-discipline”. Nor do I need alerting to the fact that Hercules was set twelve labors to perform, nor am I ignorant of the meaning of the word “slough”: and I had already twigged that it might refer in its context to the Slough of Despond in Pilgrim’s Progress. And so on.

Some readers will be glad of such notes. For me, they are useless interruptions. Because I don’t know what any particular asterisk is for, each time I encounter one I cannot forbear from turning to the back of the book. After a couple of hundred pages of this, I am somewhat ill disposed towards OUP’s editorial policy.

E-books can offer a perfect solution. Such notes could be hyperlinked, and each link graded. Beginning readers could leave them all visible; middling readers like me could hide the elementary ones; and academics could hide all but the most advanced. Or indeed, if the text were being re-read, they could all be hidden, and made visible only when the word or phrase was touched with a finger or stylus.

Onboard reference works like dictionaries and encyclopedias could also be enlisted. And with wireless access to the net, of course, the potential is limitless.

Penguin’s Enriched E-book series is a great first step on the road to realizing the potential of E. But that’s all it is – a first step, and there’s a long, long way to go.

By David Rothman

If you haven’t already, check out the thoughtful debate among TeleBlog community members on the pros and cons of PDF—in the wake of a post quoting one of the format’s defenders. I myself am not a PDF fan but want people of all opinions to feel comfortable here.

Meanwhile, I’ll make a friendly suggestion for the pro-PDF folks; in fact, the same idea could also be used with the .epub standard if this capability isn’t there already. What if PDF offered wiki-type features, so you could change text, even within a DRMed files—while the software tracked the modifications and allowed an instant reversion to the original version, the publisher-blessed one? I know. Publishers want control over their material. But they would do well to listen closely to one of our regulars, Fictbot, who shares my passion for more usable e-book technology.

Ficbot’s complaint

In her gripe, Ficbot notes that she and most other teachers are “notorious for their love of tweaking, and PDF documents are very hard to edit. Sometimes you can copy the text (but you have to reformat it once you get it into the word processor) but sometimes you can’t. Huge pain. I often have to tweak things for my students’ needs. For example, the French program I use with them does not introduce the past tense until the third level, so with nearly all of my classes, I have to change the verb tenses before I print it out.

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By Aaron S. Miller, CTO of BookGlutton, a Web-based community of readers

Moderator: Aaron Miller is CTO of BookGlutton.com, a Web-based community for e-book readers. He has 11 years of experience building Web sites for startups and established clients, including WellsFargo.com, Playstation.com, and Macys.com. Welcome to the ranks of TeleBlog contributors, Aaron, and keep the ePub criticism coming! Let’s hope that the IDPF will listen to all sides. Also see Tamas Simon’s essay. - D.R.

Links, bookmarks and annotations all depend on one important thing: the ability to uniquely identify a specific passage or point in a book. And it’s easy with paper. We put daggers and numbers where our notes belong. We highlight, clip, underline. Sometimes we just gesture at a page. But with a digital book, it’s not so easy. A digital book, materially, is something less—so we expect more. Go figure.

Humans need a computer to understand our paper-bound notions of footnotes and margin-notes so that a computer can do what computers are good at. Then we can share those notes, add our own, hide them, rearrange them, count them, abstract them into graphs, delete them. Moreover, we want pica-perfect pointers into texts, maybe even pixel-pointers, so that we have no doubts about where we left off, which syllable we’re analyzing, or where we want to jump next. To a computer, a book is a model, an abstraction of what it really is, and the more computers agree on that abstraction and how to interact with it, the better off we bookish humans will be. Too bad it’s easier said than done.

Key revelations

Smart folks of the digital book world have figured out some key things lately:

1. XML is a book’s best friend. It’s extensible, document-centric, thriving. It’s being used for .mobi, .lit, .epub and more generalized things like DocBook, ODT, and Docx. It can be criticized for bloat, but it’s open, extensible and a kind parent to XHTML. It happens to be more perfect for books than plain text.
2. Books are going Web. They’ve been on-line for awhile, in huge numbers, but until now, no one has taken the time or spent the money to care for them. By “care” I mean care in presentation, due diligence in cataloging, and measurement of the benefits and drawbacks of various technologies.
3. E-books will be cool. Right now, they’re not. At least not iTunes cool. Right now, they’re in the position the MP3 was in 1997. This was when audiophiles scoffed at the format as inferior. Half of them observed that CDs sounded better, and the other half said vinyl sounded best, and then proceeded to make fun of the ones who preferred CDs. Now, it seems, music fans realize that we can all co-exist, and that MP3s are cool in their own right. Book-loving groups aren’t so unified.

Whiffs of potential

Still, we can sense the potential. People are realizing there’s more possibility than the miles of typography-bereft scrolling and the various shopping-cart sites hawking trade at twice the price of paper. Amazon, a web company, is scrambling to figure out how to bridge worlds, extending the tradition of PHB (Proprietary Hardware for Books) while simultaneously trying to leverage their Web properties. Meanwhile publishers can be overheard babbling about widgets and blogs, and when they actually figure out what they’re saying, we’ll see an A-ha moment about DRM.

From a development angle, browser technology is quickly approaching a tipping point where typography and presentation will rival that of print and E Ink. Unlike E Ink, Web technologies are based on software, and this creates freedom and speed. And unlike print, which seems to get cheapened and not cheaper everyday, they’ll allow more at a lower cost. Someday we’ll all use something like E Ink, but not many of us will ever use E Ink as it is now.

More people can be seen firing up their MacBooks in Panera and Starbucks to get their dose of blogs and news. Younger generations, as any newspaper publisher will tell you, no longer read any news on paper.

Take note

This is all positive news. But in all this activity, no one has given much lip-service to a fundamental technology here: annotation. Granted, it’s not for everyone. But it rests upon the ability to point to fragments of documents, even as those fragments change.

The Web can be seen as an example of the perfect space to solve this problem, or a sad example of how annotation has been ignored, depending on one’s camp. Those in the Berners-Lee camp, if there is such a place, would look to the Semantic Web for standards and solutions. But those who look to Ted Nelson will tell you we didn’t implement everything we needed when we invented the Web. Nelson’s original concept included annotations and unbreakable links as part of the fabric of hypermedia. Now, we’re stuck improvising these things on top of a core infrastructure that was never intended for them. And we’re faced with the perplexing question: What happens to metadata when a resource disappears—or worse, when it changes?

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