TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

By David Rothman

How easy is it to produce an ePub book—either your own or a public domain work—and spread it around the globe?

This topic is more than just grist for a post. I wanted to give the planet a quick preview of The Solomon Scandals in the standard IDPF format. And, if, along the way, people could also download Mobipocket and PDF versions of the three-chapter sample, not just ePub, then so much the better.

Easy to learn

Now, having tried the publishing tool at Feedbooks, I can say that it’s as easy to master as I’d hoped—at least if I want to stick to standard formatting. I’m unworried about frills in my case, even though ePub allows plenty for those who need them.

My Feedbooks file isn’t a heavily illustrated medical textbook, but rather an excerpt from a novel without photos.

The Stanza-iPhone connection

But I do want the sample from Scandals to be readable easily on an iPhone by way of Stanza, the most popular e-reading app for the iP and iPod Touch. Now, thanks to Feedbooks’ integration with Stanza, it is. Check it out for yourself.

From Stanza’s Library screen, just go to the Online Catalog, pick Original Books and Stories, then call up Recent Additions, and you’ll most likely see a screen showing Scandals’ cover. In case Scandals is no longer in RA, you can also search by title or my name. Or you can click for the next screen.

A few how-tos

But how to get your book in Feedbooks’ system, in ePub and other formats? The key is to follow the documentation and structure your book in components as Feedbooks suggests. You’re actually better off creating the skeleton of the book before you load it up with actual text.

For example, you an specify Parts—such as Part I—and chapters within them. Feedbooks provides lines along the left edge of the screen so you can see how the different components relate to each other.

Quick trip between views

I also like the interface’s ease of snapping back and forth between draft and a semi-WYSIWYG mode. A quick click will do the trick. You can also slip, almost instantly, into previews in Adobe Digital Editions, a PDF-only reader or Mobipocket.

Of course, ePub is the format of most interest to me, and Feedbooks has done the e-book community a real service in using it a the flagship format. Let me also praise Smashwords and BookGlutton for their own ePub efforts. Yes, there will be technical challenges along the way, but at least those sites are trying—which is really in the interest of readers and publishers alike. TeleRead’s Chris Meadows has shown us how Amazon may very well be sitting on a Mobi reader for the iPhone. And that’s the kind of world we’ll get if proprietary formats prevail, whether from Amazon, Apple or ScrollMotion. Time for the Kindle and ScrollMotion to do ePub!

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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 Jon Noring

When I was in college I collected 78 RPM phonograph records, primarily jazz records from the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. Either I was good at collecting, or just lucky. I found and acquired several large jazz and blues collections (a total of over 100,000 records, about 25 tons, passed through my fingers), and didn’t lose a dime in the process.

I’ve long since given up massively collecting the “old 78’s”, and today have only kept a few favorites. One favorite I kept, a quite rare classic jazz recording from late 1928, is shown to the right. [note 1] My experience collecting older sound recordings has given me some unique perspectives as it relates to media, e-books, copyright, conversion, archiving, formats, etc.

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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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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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