TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘dotReader’ Category

By Jon Noring

Moderator’s note: Great timing, Jon. I’ve just posted The Triumph of social sites: Publishers, listen up! Annotation-style capabilities, of course, will make in-book communities possible. - D.R.

David Rothman recently called on IDPF to develop an open standard, third-party annotation and linking format. I’ve previously written about the need for such a standard in two TeleRead articles [1, 2]. Hopefully the third time will be a charm!

The need for such a standard is pretty obvious. Various companies are already implementing their own proprietary standards for third-party annotation of, and linking between, digital media such as books, music, video, etc. Annotation and linking of content (no matter the type of content) is rapidly becoming a vital and fundamental component of interactivity with content, being of great value to business, academia, education, libraries and archives, social networking, etc.

Thus it is important for interoperability (that is, to prevent another Tower of eBabel) to have a single, well-designed, open standard format for third-party annotation and linking. From my research in this area, I have not yet found a developed standard suitable for this purpose (but if one exists, let me know, please!)

“Real-World” example: Annotating an e-book

Because the above introduction is a tad theoretical, let me give a fun “real-world” example to better illustrate what I’m discussing:

Mary is sitting on the beach reading a steamy romance novel on her e-book reading device (e.g., laptop computer, or dedicated e-book reader.) In a particular scene of the story, she is introduced to a character named “Charles,” about whom she really would like to share her thoughts with others. For example, she might want to share something relatively academic like “Charles reminds me of a character right out of a 19th century English novel,” or maybe something a little more earthy and personal like “Wow, Charles is a real hunk!” (I’m not sure if “Charles” can be both!)

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By David Rothman

Linda Houle over at L&L Dreamspell, a small Houston-area publisher doing both E and P, wants to offer books in the IDPF’s .epub format—not just Mobipocket and the other standard suspects.

Smart move, Linda. When we raze the Tower of eBabel of conflicting e-formats, life will be happier for publishers and readers alike. The .epub standard has won support among major companies, and if expectations hold up, the Sony Reader and the Cybook Gen3 will come with .epub capabilities in the near future. So will the future E Ink machines from eBook Technologies, Inc., whose people go back in e-books to the late 1990s and played a major role in development of the .epub standard.

An experimental open source .epub-capable program, FBReader, already exists for the iLiad E Ink machine. What’s more, ideally, the Amazon Kindle will be able to deal with .epub as well in the near future—by if nothing else letting you convert the format into the Kindle’s own. Fingers crossed.

Fill in the blanks—with your own .epub recs

So, TeleBlog techies, for possible pick-up in my E-Book Report blog for Publishers Weekly online, what’s your advice in plain English on .epub creation procedures and software for publishers like L&L Dreamspell? And what is the best software for Linda and her L&L partner, Lisa Renee Smith, to recommend to their human readers?

Here are a few preliminary thoughts on e-book creation choices, followed by those on reading programs such as Adobe Digital Editions and FBReader. Help me fill in the blanks in the advice below for small publishers, and speak up if you disagree!

Creation possibility #1: Adobe InDesign CS3

If you’ve got the budget, consider Adobe InDesign CS3, discussed in the blog of Adobe’s Bill McCoy as well as in a Publishing Report 2007 and a link-rich Wikipedia item.

This could be a great solution as long as you pay attention to the caveats below. (more…)

By David Rothman

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). (more…)

By David Rothman

“In the next few weeks OSoft will release two new plug-ins to enable the dotReader to render Project Gutenberg books in both the zipped HTML and Plain Text ASCII formats. Soon, dotReader fans will have access to over 20,000 classic titles that can be browsed, searched, bookmarked, and annotated in the dotReader.” - OSoft announcement.

By David Rothman

“Compared to the last public beta, the release candidate has a revamped user interface, adds support for multiple bookshelves, improves the PDF viewing with smooth scrolling and enhanced zooming, and adds annotations capabilities with support for bookmarks, highlighting, and text notes,” says Alex at MobileRead in discussing Adobe Digital Editions. This is said to be a near-final version.

The TeleRead take: It will be interesting to see how far Adobe goes in allowing shared notes, highlighting and related capabilities associated with Sophie and dotReader.

By David Rothman

“The idea was simple, re-introduce reading to students as a social activity by providing them an online space where they could review books and share their thoughts with teachers and peers. To accomplish this, we built a book review site using the powerful open source content management system, Drupal.” - Christopher Harris in Infomancy.

The TeleRead take: Alexander Central Schools, a rural system in Western New York state, used Drupal’s book review module. Perhaps people there could experiment with OSoft’s dotReader, which is open source, lets comments be appear in books, and has a Drupal creation module (not the same as the book review module). Meanwhile, here are more details from Chris, director of the district’s library system–which just might be a role model in certain respects for the One Laptop Per Child Project:

“Over the course of this pilot year, the roughly 60 students in the Alexander 6th grade (the single pilot grade) submitted almost 600 book reviews! While some teachers adopted the book review site and used it for a class assignment as a way to track reading (there is a 25 book a year requirement in NY state), most of the reviews came from students who just loved the new system. We actually ran into some backup issues because the site was unable to lock the database for copying at 1:00 a.m. as there were students writing book reviews at that time. (more…)

By David Rothman

“Ian is looking into looking into a simple reader interface that renders any HTML page, not only those that have been preprocessed, as a way of integrating our current book-reader concept more neatly with the browser.” - OLPC’s Walter Bender.

The TeleRead take: Books now exist in a different world from the Web and the related interactivity. This is one step to narrow the gap. Among other things, the $100/$175 laptop project is investigating a “heatmap-style” commenting system (example here). Cool. Hello, Sophie and dotReader? Something to consider in a tweaked form?

By Jon Noring

Tomorrow (the 16th) is the last day for the public and IDPF members to provide feedback on the draft OPS 2.0 standard (the XML-based framework behind the upcoming “epub” e-book open standard). OPS 2.0 is currently in its last public review stage before moving on to final tweaking and approval by the IDPF membership.

Speak now or forever hold your peace!

Thus, it is important that anyone planning to use OPS 2.0 in any manner — from authoring to presentation — should go over the OPS 2.0 draft spec (and the auxiliary OPF 2.0 draft spec) and provide feedback. Your feedback is easy to provide: post your reply to Nick Bogaty’s IDPF forum announcement. A few people, including yours truly, have already provided feedback to this forum topic. (Note, if you do provide feedback, click on the “post reply” button, not the “new topic” button.)

Importantly note you need not be an IDPF member for your input to be considered. All input will be considered on an equal basis.

Once the OPS 2.0 spec is finalized and approved by the IDPF membership (which it likely will), it will be etched in stone, and future changes or improvements to the spec will be somewhat restricted to maintain compatibility. This is all the more reason to provide feedback if you are concerned about any aspect of OPS 2.0.

Why should anyone care about the “epub” open standard?

The obvious question is if epub has any chance of becoming an important (or even the dominant) reflowable e-book standard in the marketplace?

In my estimation it has a great chance. First, the OPS 2.0 spec (which, as noted previously, forms the underlying framework for epub) is an update to OEBPS 1.2. (more…)

By David Rothman

What do the IDPF’s new e-book standards mean to publishers? Just what’s a container format? And will the old OEPBS system be readable by software based on the new standards? Those are among the questions answered in a Digital Book 2007 presentation by Garth Conboy of eBook Technologies, Inc., one of the key players in the IDPF’s standards initiative.

This post also contains direct links to dozens of other presentations from the IDPF’s Digital Book 2007 and conferences from earlier years. Later I’ll highlight a few presentations, and meanwhile I’d encourage TeleBlog readers to look through the files and share their own thoughts in the comment area, taking care to be fair and accurate. Just click on “Read the rest of this entry” to reach the direct links here, which, by the way, should make the individual presentations more discoverable by search engines.

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By Jon Noring

DigitalPulp Publishing (DPP), a member of IDPF, is the first publisher (as far as we know) to release an e-book in IDPF’s new “epub” format: My Ántonia by Willa S. Cather. This e-book is being freely distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

At present our e-book is only downloadable from IDPF’s web site, but will soon be available through DPP’s site. In addition, I’ve posted a message to the public IDPF Standards Forum summarizing, in gory detail, which features of OPS 2.0 are and are not supported (OPS 2.0 is the backbone specification underlying “epub” — currently OPS 2.0 is in the final Member and Public Review stage.)

There are currently two ways to read our epub:

1. Adobe Digital Editions (currently in beta), or

2. Use your browser to view the XML documents (which are XHTML 1.1) contained inside the epub.

For browser viewing (which will be nowhere near optimal compared to Adobe DE), extract the files using any zip application and view the “*.xml” files in the “OPS” folder. The main content document is the file “myantonia.xml”. For best results, use a current version of Firefox, Opera or IE, and keep the present folder structure so the links work and referenced CSS style sheets and images are used.

OSoft’s dotReader will also soon support “epub”.

DPP plans to issue and distribute most of the e-books it directly publishes for authors in the epub format once the OPS 2.0 standard is elevated to the final “Recommended” status. (Note: at David Rothman’s request I plan to post an article discussing the upcoming OPS 2.0 standard, as well as discuss the current status and future of OpenReader.)

Other publishers are welcome to “decompile” this epub publication and use it as an aid to learn the OPS 2.0 specification and as a template to build your own epub publications.

Happy reading!

The author of this article, Jon Noring, is VP of Development for DigitalPulp Publishing. He also contributed to the development of OPS 2.0.

By David Rothman

Pity the publisher trying to promote an e-book. How to alert prospective buyers? How many e-books have you seen piled up at Barnes & Noble? And has Oprah touted an e-book original lately? Oh, and forget about newspaper book supplements, which can’t even do justice to p-books and are dying or being folded into other sections.

What to do? Could a formula be found through which publishers could spread glad tidings about e-fiction and e-nonfiction alike?

Search engines: Important—but just one kind of tool

Publishers talk about the use of Amazon and search engines as ways for consumers to find books, and in fact, Evan Schnittman, a bizdev-and-rights VP for the U.S. end of the venerable Oxford University Press, has nicely laid out the benefits of services such as Google Book Search and Windows Live. See parts I and II of his essay. The goal is to make 100 percent of a book searchable through the engines—to weave it into the skein of the Internet.

Turbocharged searching alone, however, won’t be enough to spread word about books of interest to buyers. What about a personal touch, too? Can a search engine alone create a best-seller, for example, or help the world discover a promising new novelist? Might there still be room left for human- rather than just Google-powered initiatives? (more…)

By David Rothman

The guys at OSoft love to brag about dotReader’s shared annotations and highlighting—so students and teachers, for example, can swap insights or bafflement over a passage in Ulysses. But what if a rival e-reader from a well-financed company like Ingram already has such capabilities or soon will?

In fact, when I gave VitalSource Bookshelf 4.5 a very quick spin this morning, I saw the shared-highlights wrinkle mentioned in a menu, and I’m assuming that the shared notes will be on the way soon if they’re not present already. Certainly, there are different levels of sharing—with friends, with a class, with the world, for instance—and it’ll be interesting to learn how BookShelf stacks up with dotReader in that regard. So far, I just see a place to put “friends” on a subscription list, and, of course, there are other issues for use on and off campus such as whether an e-reader can support ads (one way to lower textbook costs for students). We know that Adobe is doing ads and will be getting more and more into collaborative features.

In my very quick test drive of Bookshelf—which reached Ingram via last year’s acquisition of VitalSource—here’s what I liked: (more…)