TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Bill McCoy’ Category

By Paul Biba

Bill McCoy discusses this at great length on this Books 2.0 blog. Here’s the fist little bit:

I often receive queries like:

I am converting the Word file of my book to a PDF (a bit later in epub). To be read on as many devices as possible, is PDF or PDF/A better? PDF/A-1a or PDF/A-1b?

This may seem like a rather nit-picky question, and the bottom-line answer is straightforward: stick to PDF/A to maximize portability, and the lower conformance level “b” is fine. But some interesting strategic points are illustrated by the details underlying this answer. …

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Adobe, e-book, e-books, ebook, ebooks, Paul Biba, PDF

By Paul Biba

Bill McCoy has started his own blog, as opposed to the one he used when he was at Adobe, and he calls it Bill McCoy: Books 2.0. He starts off by saying:

As well, my work at Adobe these last three years has been centered around a relatively prosaic objective: establishing open standards that enable multi-channel/cross-device distribution of eBooks. For all intents and purposes, this work is done: epub is now firmly established as the industry standard for reflow-centric eBooks. That took a considerable effort, on the part of many people, and I’m really proud that we did it. But… that was the easy part: essentially migration of print to digital. epub does take portable documents to the next level – breaking past beyond PDF’s paper-replica model. But that’s only the beginning of the fundamental reinvention of the book that digital content and the Web will enable. In other words: now it’s really going to get interesting. I expect my future work, and this blog, to focus on this transformation.

By David Rothman

Bill McCoy, Adobe’s main e-book guy, is leaving the company “in the near future to pursue other opportunities ‘to be determined.’” He is one of many departing the Adobe, which is trimming back 680 jobs out of around 7,600 to help stay afloat in this dismal economy. I wish everyone the best of luck, especially Bill.

Among various projects, Bill and his team have been involved with Adobe Reader Mobile SDK, Adobe Content Server, Adobe Digital Editions and Adobe InDesign. Bill sits on the board of the International Digital Publishing Forum, the e-book industry’s main trade group, and has played a major role in the ePub standards movement.

To put it mildly, Bill and I haven’t always seen eye to eye, but the “best of luck” is far from mere politeness. One of TeleRead’s main missions, as I see it, is to encourage open standards—so that people can own e-books for real, without worrying about new formats and DRM. Not all our contributors are as fervent about it as I am. But that’s my priority, at least, in addition to the fight for a well-stocked national digital library system. How has Bill figured in this? By corporate standards, he has been a positive phenomenon despite our differences.

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By Bill McCoy, General Manager, ePublishing Business, Adobe Systems

I remain opposed to DRMed e-books, at least for nonlibrary purposes; but in the interest of fairness, here are thoughts from Adobe’s Bill McCoy, adapted with permission from a Reading 2.0 post. Civil replies, please. I myself liked a blog post Bill did where he personally championed social DRM. Let’s hope that Adobe will officially give the SDRM idea a shot—I see a little hope. – D.R.

Adobe’s interests are far more aligned with the adoption of open formats that we can address with our authoring tools and services. We see e-book DRM as an enabler for a larger market, one that we can address with our tools and services on a level playing field vs. proprietary silos that give a choke-hold to players who have a strong position in the book distribution value chain. We don’t forecast revenue from e-book DRM even in the best case ever itself being a large material business for Adobe—large enough to pay its way and allow us to sustain and enhance the solution, but quite small relative to our other tools and services.

I’ve said before that Adobe’s open to evolving towards a non-proprietary ubiquitous DRM standard, even as we see obstacles to getting there in the near future (especially around IP enablement). What we don’t want to see is one proprietary solution taking over control, or fragmentation of multiple proprietary solutions. Publishers have already voted with their feet, so to speak, by requiring/letting Amazon deploy DRM. If the only reasonable cross-platform alternative for eBooks was to go DRM-free, then some publishers would distribute only through Amazon, leading to everyone else getting "iTunesd". So to me it’s pretty obvious that cross-platform eBook DRM that works with EPUB and PDF is necessary to ensure that the open, cross-platform alternative wins. But if every publisher were to choose to go DRM free, using PDF & EPUB but not DRM, hey I’d have absolutely no problem with that outcome.

By Paul Biba

Excerpt from Bill McCoy’s blog appears below. Also see earlier TeleRead post.

Adobe has just released, under BSD license, EPUBGen, a Java library that generates EPUB.

To quote from our digital publishing developer blog:

EPUBGen is a Java library that demonstrates EPUB generation from a variety of document formats, and which may be a useful starting point or reference code for other EPUB generation needs. That is to say, it’s an effort to promote the development of a variety of tools and workflows.

EPUBGen has both a set of back-end code generation modules and front end format importer modules. The back-end modules generate EPUB and illustrate more advanced functionality, including font subset embedding with obfuscation

The code itself can be found on the epub-tools Google Code site, which includes other sub-projects witg Python/XSLT scripts for generating EPUB from DocBook and TEI XML. For more of the gory details on font embedding with obfuscation (aka "mangling"), which illustrates the recently published IDPF Tech Note about same, see this related blog post.

By Bill McCoy, General Manager, ePublishing Business, Adobe Systems

EPUB, not just PDF, can be a path to visually rich books.

Contrary to misunderstandings, for example, the IDPF’s format standard for e-books does support inline charts and graphs well.

In particular, EPUB supports SVG which is, not coincidentally, a very close analog to PDF page contents.

So anything one can represent on a PDF page or portion thereof can be represented in  EPUB, with real, selectable text and scalable vector graphics. 

A progressive academic journal provider, Hindawi Publishing has developed an innovative workflow that results in EPUB with inline SVG for mathematical figures and illustrations. For example, if you open this example in Adobe Digital Editions, you will see that the equations are zoomable and that text within the equations is live and zoomable. Check out other Hindawi examples.

Visual richness in other respects

Beyond SVG, visual richness in EPUB is further enabled by embedded font support, CSS styling, and the ability to embed rich media objects (including Flash where supported).

As well, there is an experimental extension to EPUB for page templates based on XSL-FO. Dynamic conditions, for example, can enable things like customizing the decision points for when to shift between 1/2/3 columns, etc.

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By David Rothman

I’m not the only TeleRead guy with a newspaper-related novel. Stephen Walkwalker, one of our newest contributors, has written Say My Name, a thriller about a Boston newspaper guy framed for financial and sexual sins.

Steve’s book starts far too slowly. But like a train racing along in the open countryside after a pokey departure from a downtown station, this one really picks up. I can’t wait to read what happens to Steve’s hero, Stanley Branford, the victim of the ID theft.

The novel is a Kindle-format book written under the name of Steve Holt. And if I owned a Kindle II E Ink gizmo, I could go on an e-walk outside and automatically resume where I left off on the Kindle app on my LCD-lit iPod Touch. Caught up in the suspense of a courtroom scene, I wouldn’t have to waste time searching through the book for same “page.”

Time for open syncing capability

I’d love to see the synced-autobookmark feature in many other e-readers—with interbrand capability and the standard ePub format, and ideally without DRM to muck it up. That way, I might start in Stanza or another app on the Touch and go on to enjoy Say My Name on my Stony PRS 505, which, like the Kindle, has sunlight-friendly E Ink.

This scenario of open synching would be a win for most everyone, vendors and readers; even Amazon would benefit in the long term since e-book would be less of a hassle. The Lexcycle people, the developers of Stanza, loved the open sync idea when I discussed it with them over lunch at Tools of Change. The key is to have the right standards for syncing and reading among different apps and devices, and meanwhile, if Steve can release an ePub version of Say My Name, then so much the better.

Another friend of the sync idea: Bill McCoy at Adobe

Now the sync idea has yet another supporter, IDPF board member Bill McCoy of Adobe (who, you’ll recall, has joined Lexycle and others in championing another good idea—open distribution, formally proposed by Lexcycle).

In an e-mail responding to my query, Bill has actually gone beyond me, and I like where he’s coming from:

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By Bill McCoy, General Manager, ePublishing Business, Adobe Systems

Moderator: The Stanza e-book reader for the iPhone lets you call up catalogs from a number of sites, including commercial stores. But what if many other e-book readers had this capability? Lexcycle, Stanza’s developers, wants an Atom-based standard for this to happen—a great idea. And Lexcycle has a powerful new ally in Adobe’s Bill McCoy. I’ll be curious to see what if any response Amazon or Google will have, in words or strategy. – D.R.

Stanza, the leading iPhone eBook software, includes an excellent online catalog system that enables users to seamlessly acquire free and commercial content from within the application.

The Lexcycle team built this system in an open, extensible manner using Atom. Adobe and Lexcycle have been working together on Adobe PDF and ePub eBook support, and now we are deepening that collaboration in working together, along with the Internet Archive and others, to establish an open architecture enabling widespread discovery, description, and access of book and other published material on the open web. The Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS) is a generalization of the Atom approach used by Stanza’s online catalog.

I’m grateful to the Lexcycle team as well as my friend and colleague Peter Brantley for their efforts on behalf of open access and interoperability.

This work is at a relatively early stage, as evidenced by the “DRAFT” notice on the specification wiki and the intentionally lightweight process (i.e. not yet involving a de jure standards body). We are taking a page from the way Atom itself was nurtured in the early going. If you are a reading system provider, or a distributor of free or commercial digital publications and are interested in signing on as a supporter and contributing to the definition of OPDS, get in touch with Peter, myself, or Marc Prud’hommeaux at Lexcycle.

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By David Rothman

Here is an excerpt from Adobe e-booker Bill McCoy’s new post in his DRM debate with library tech guru Peter Brantley:

Now, let me say up front that I don’t think ebook DRM is "good good good" any more than I think that of taxation, standing armies, or the proliferation of nuclear technology. But although one may dislike taxation, one may dislike even more the likely consequences of eliminating taxes (diminished schools, roads, law enforcement, …). Peter’s post focused on negative attributes of DRM in isolation. But to me, the important thing is to look at likely outcomes given various scenarios, and to consider what these outcomes would mean for the principal actors involved (authors, publishers, and readers). Not whether something is good or bad but whether it’s better or worse than the likely alternative.

To me, it’s pretty clear that the establishment by the industry of a broadly adopted cross-platform ebook DRM system should lead to a significantly better outcome for all concerned than if no such platform ends up getting established. "DRM" is a somewhat loaded term: to clarify, by "ebook DRM" I mean a relatively lightweight means of limiting and/or discouraging copying and use beyond publisher-permitted limits, intended more to "keep honest people honest" than to totally prevent copying. After all, a book can be scanned and digitized, or even re-keyed, with only a middling level of difficulty — so aiming for "ironclad" DRM is not warranted, even if it were feasible.

Your thoughts?

By David Rothman

A DRM debate has started between digilib guru Peter Brantley and Adobe’s Bill McCoy. Both sit on the board of the International Digital Publishing Forum, some of whose member companies want an interoperable DRM standard.

Peter, executive director of the Digital Library Federation, argues that DRM  isn’t worth messing with. Bill undoubtedly will be talking up DRM as useful technology for libraries and other loan-related apps. I just hope he won’t be as gung ho about DRM for retail purposes—DRM is a sales toxin that penalizes honest book-buyers without stopping piracy. Bill himself has written the following in the past: "I would like nothing more than to have DRM technology just fade away." He didn’t say Adobe should stop doing DRM for publishers wanting it, but even he recognizes its major negatives.

Small publisher vs. DRM

Others go further. My publisher, Lida Quillen of Twilight Times Books, successfully urged eReader.com not to DRM-hobble her books. And that reflects the commonsense of many a small publisher. I just hope the big boys will wake up about DRM’s downside, especially in retail. People want to own books for real, a point that Peter himself has eloquently made.

You can read Peter’s first shot, in the O’Reilly TOC blog, and Bill’s reply will follow there. Ahead is one of the best arguments in the Brantley post:

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By Bill McCoy, General Manager, ePublishing Business, Adobe Systems

Earlier I raised the issue of how many e-books Amazon was selling that were truly commercial. I’m not the only one. Here are personal opinions of Adobe’s Bill McCoy, adapted with his permission from the Reading 2.0 e-mail list. – D.R.

Apple is unlikely to be able to pull an iPod here, but not because Amazon has any kind of insurmountable lead in e-book selection. I don’t think that’s the case, not at all.

First, the selection of commercially relevant e-books at the Kindle Store is still very thin. Less coverage of what really sells in trade than a decent airport bookstore. Much of the “vast” Kindle Store selection is filler eDocs. Some major publisher lists are MIA. This has already been discussed on the list so I won’t belabor the point. But the race to get everything that sells in digital isn’t over, it isn’t even half over. When you get beyond U.S. market, it has barely begun, and Kindle is not the leader.

Secondly, the aggregation of e-books by Ingram and others includes not only the content but the commercial relationships that enable multiples downstream retailers. To map to physical book value chain, they are not just distributors, they can act as wholesalers. In this model the publisher retains more control over the pricing (vs. a retailer being able to impose their own will), but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

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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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