TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Joseph Gray’ Category

By David Rothman

A Dow Jones news service story is full of upbeat quotes on the Android cellphone platform’s chances. If the ballyhoo pans out, that could be good news for FBReader, the open source app which can read ePub  among other formats and has an Android version of the way.

Yes, reading software for ePub exists besides Adobe Digital Editions, and I hope that the global publishing industry will get behind these alternatives and encourage improvements in them—rather than relying simply on one vendor. Nothing against Adobe here. But how can ePub catch on quickly as a standard without decent choices of reading and creation tools? Cellphones, moreover, are of interest since their displays will be getting much better for e-reading, with rollout E Ink becoming common in time.

Related: Quick, IDPF! Do that ePub logo! Bookseller.com items show need for action before Amazon and Sony steal you mindshare—forever, our recent post that mentions the software question, not just the logo one. Also see Joseph Gray’s post headlined ePub readers: Adobe Digital Editions, FBReader and OpenBerg Lector—reviewed with a little tough love.

Housekeeping: This will be my last post today until at least the afternoon, although it’s possible that other contributors may show up here.

By Joseph Gray

Nessmuk was the pen name of George W. Sears, who wrote extensively for Forest and Stream magazine in the late 1800’s. The name is supposed to mean “wood duck” in the language of a Massachusetts Indian tribe. Sears also wrote two books, Woodcraft and Forest Runes, which is a volume of poetry.

The book Woodcraft was originally published in 1884 by Forest and Stream Publishing. The book was immensely popular and remained in print for decades. The last edition was published in 1920, again by Forest and Stream. In 1963, Dover Publishing did a somewhat edited reprint of the 1920 edition, calling it Woodcraft and Camping.

What was unique about this book was the philosophy of the author, which is illustrated by this passage: “Go light; the lighter the better, so that you have the simplest material for health, comfort and enjoyment.” This was written well over 100 years ago, when most people who took to the woods needed guides and horses to carry all of their excess equipment. If you do an internet search on “Nessmuk”, you will see that even today, there are those who can sell you an ultra-light “Nessmuk canoe”.

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By David Rothman

Tim Bajarin, a well-known industry analyst, tested the new Sony on a European trip and liked the results even though he cautions that e-book tech is still at the early-adopter stage. Here’s his PC Mag writeup.

In a nutshell, he sees four obstacles for the Sony. First, reluctance to shift from paper, at least among aging baby boomers, the very people who could benefit from the large-font option. Second, the cost of $299. Third, lack of color, which could hurt the Reader in the education market. Fourth, not enough digitized. That said, Bajarin believes that e-books are here to stay.

Meanwhile I hope that IDPF standard-setters will read between the lines and hurry up with format-validation and the .epub logos it could make possible—to simplify e-books, with those boomers in mind. Elimination of DRM would help as well. But if not—I won’t dream—the IDPF should press hard for DRM standards. “DRM is still a tough nut,” Adobe’s Bill McCoy recently blogged, “but with epub providing the open standard complement to PDF for reflow-centric text-based content, we are well on our way.” I hope so, Bill.

Related: Bill’s thoughts on the future of the iTunes store. Will we see many iTunes stores in time? And what are the lessons for e-books? I’m slightly less optimistic than Bill, in terms of avoidance of onerous centralization. Amazon is already acting like a nasty monopolist in casting out the PDF option in favor of its own Mobipocket. Yet one more argument for standards!

And speaking of Amazon, Sony’s rival: Oh, the arrogance of Amazon when it comes to my obtaining a review unit of the Kindle—even for a venerable publication like Publishers Weekly! Faithful to the official script from above, an Amazon guy acted as if the Kindle didn’t exist. I’m not going to let this influence my opinion of the machine, which seems to have many promising features, such as word-search. It will influence my opinion of Amazon—in terms of its publisher-friendliness or lack thereof—if these games continue.

Technorati Tags: Sony Reader , Tim Bajarin , PRS-505 , Sony Reader PRS-505

By Joseph Gray

Moderator’s note: We welcome Joseph Gray, a super-helpful TeleBlog commenter and a standards-loving IT guy, as our latest contributor. This is Part I of a two-part series. - DR

With the recent finalization by the IDPF of the three specifications that comprise an epub, I thought I would see exactly what this new ebook format was capable of. For testing purposes, I created an epub using the information in the IDPF specifications. To the best of my knowledge, the only commercial software currently available for creating an epub is Adobe InDesign. I took the low tech approach and used a text editor.

In this article, I will detail the steps necessary to create an epub using a text editor and a program like WinZip or 7Zip. In the second installment, I will describe some of my experiences with the epub reading software currently available. These are FBReader, Adobe Digital Editions and the Openberg Lector plugin for Firefox.

I initially found information about the process of creating an epub detailed on a few other web sites. Although very helpful, some of the information on these other sites was written before the IDPF specifications were finalized, so it was no longer completely accurate. I will provide an updated example here. Note that any information provided in this article is my interpretation of the specifications and may also be in error. You should check the specification documents yourself to ensure accuracy. (more…)