TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Liza Daly’ Category

By Jon Noring

Flexibility helps keep us healthy. We can better enjoy physical activity which, in turn, motivates us to exercise. Keep on stretchin’!

Likewise, a flexible digital publication format is much better for the industry—and for readers—than a rigid, limited one.

To be more precise, a flexible format is more likely to be embraced, due to business pressures.

The IDPF’s new open standard e-book format, ePUB, is rapidly proving its flexibility. And ePUB’s flexibility is, of course, intentional by design.

A little history of ePUB’s predecessor as a consumer standard

Five years, two months and eight days ago, I published the reviewed eBookWeb article: “OEBPS: The Universal Consumer eBook Format?” My article delved into some of the requirements an e-book format must meet to be potentially embraced by the digital publishing industry as the consumer standard. From the requirements analysis, I concluded that IDPF’s OEBPS specification met these requirements and could become, when the time is ripe, the industry standard.

And indeed we are now seeing a groundswell of interest in ePUB by publishers and application developers. The primary reason is its flexibility in a number of areas, some of which are only now being recognized. I’ll delve into a couple of them in this article. [Note 1]

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By Liza Daly of threepress.org

"Three miles of books"—that’s the caption on a Flickr photo of a Blackwell’s bookstore.

Someday could the books all be online? Imagine working on your thesis at the beach. Just how much progress are academic publishers and university libraries making?  Here in the States, at least, many trade publishers are buzzing about the Kindle. Academic publishers, however, along with their library customers, are not quite as excited about Kindle-style e-books yet despite growing interest in digital works.

Leaders beyond the Kindle realm

But in many ways the academic houses been the real leaders in delivering other kinds of online content, whether as standalone product databases or as part of library aggregators. Universities see E as a way to fight the growing costs of academic journals and, yes, books, too. One study of academic, public and special libraries showed that only 25 percent of library spending on e-books was with individual publishers, while close to 70 percent was with aggregators.

Such thoughts come to mind not only from various statistics but also from the time I spent on May 29 at the "Going Large with E-Books" seminar at the annual conference of the Society for Scholarly Publishing in Boston. Despite the name, e-books in the usual sense were just part of the agenda.

Two different strategies but a common skepticism of DRM

Life-science publisher CABI recommended starting small and diversifying with multiple platforms where feasible. The Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers chose a single vendor that could deliver online features like subscription-based access and full-text search, but also provide a print-on-demand service.  Both presenters stressed that DRM was something to be avoided or at least made unobtrusive.

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By Liza Daly of threepress.org

Moderator: Liza Daly, our newest contributor, runs threepress.org, an open source project. See her bio at the end. Welcome, Liza! - D.R.

"Do one thing, and do it well" is the core of the Unix Philosophy. Unix is the third major flavor of operating system besides Windows and Mac OS (actually a certain-flavored Unix), and it’s the platform that serves most of the content on the Internet. Whether you are aware of Unix or not, its software development ideology has had pervasive influence in making the Internet an open platform not dominated by any one corporate interest.

I’d like to see this philosophy of loosely coupled, single-use tools applied more widely to digital publishing, and e-book development in particular. This is the time for publishers to look beyond the monolithic, closed-source frameworks that have defined conversion and digital workflows to date.

Three tenets in software development can apply here:

1. Most technical problems have been solved before. Start with those solutions and customize only when necessary.

2. Less code is better than more code. Specialized ("domain-specific") languages such as XSLT can dramatically reduce the amount of code that one has to write because they are so tightly coupled to the source XML.

3. Find ways to make all these different programs work together. If a better one comes along, make it easy to switch it in.

A lot of this philosophy was reflected in the thinking about the ePub standard:

1. XHTML and CSS already have the vocabulary and software support to display reflowable digital content.

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