TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Archive for the ‘Jon Noring’ 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]

(more…)

By Jon Noring

Recently I’ve started to build my connections at LinkedIn. From my vantage point LinkedIn appears to be an excellent professionally-oriented online networking service.

I’m also active in Facebook, and that has proven to be great for both personal and professional networking. (I don’t bother with MySpace for reasons I won’t explain here.)

Anyway, I looked around LinkedIn for a general networking group for anyone involved in the digital publishing universe, and was surprised to find such a group did not exist (or if one does, it is very well hidden.)

Thus, to fill the vacuum, I’ve started the LinkedIn group “Digital Publishing Network” (DPN). If you have a LinkedIn account, go to the group’s invite page.

You are welcome to join DPN if you have (or had) any professional, advocate or general-interest role in the digital publishing/publication universe. The digital publishing universe is itself quite diverse and includes publishers, authors and writers, distributors/retailers, conversion specialists, technology and standards developers/providers, academic researchers, librarians/archivists, journalists, and accessibility activists, to name a few roles and types welcome in DPN.

(more…)

By David Rothman

Second Life—you could almost make a career of it. Has Google created a simpler approach? Can even an absolute novice set up a room within the new Lively service? Actually I just did. Now I hope that others can take my sparsely furnished room to the next level. VR isn’t my thing, but it may be yours, so enjoy!

Go to Lively to download the software; then click on this image and check out The TeleRead Room.

Jon Noring, a long time VR booster, as well as the founder of the eBook Community List and ePub Community List, will help host the experimental room. Other volunteers welcome! E-mail me and cc Jon. Here’s a chance to connect with other Kindle or Sony Reader owners or maybe even e-book fans within your area.  Maybe people who enjoy the same writers? In the comment section, post your interests and when you’lll be in the room, in GMT or Eastern Daylight.

Related: Watch out, Second Life! Google’s hit the Web with Lively VR—plus a Wikipedia item.

By David Rothman

It’s official now. This fall, Twilight Times Books, a small literary publisher, will publish The Solomon Scandals as both a nonDRMed e-book and a trade paperback.

My Scandals might be the only Washington newspaper novel that ends with a talking Afghan Hound named Thackeray II doing a Harry Truman send-up at the Cosmos Club. I frame the main plot, set around the 1980s, with a foreword and epilogue written in the late 21st century. I’m just a time-warpy kind of guy—warped, too?—having started the novel back in the 1970s on an electric typewriter. Scandals blends Suspense with Quirky, Washington, lots of Newspaper, some Science Fiction of course, and a few other stray genres.

(more…)

By Jon Noring

I have been quite perplexed in reading the many comments about IDPF’s “ePub” format following the release late last year of its underlying specs. A number of very smart people, including several developers who naturally dig deeply into tech specs, have painted ePub as a dark and mysterious digital publication (e-book) format, unlike anything else in the Universe™.

The way some have discussed ePub, if Indiana Jones were to explore the deep caverns of ePub, he would probably find something exotic and other-worldly, maybe even the remnants of a long-lost civilization. [note 1]

In reality, though, the opposite is true. ePub is internally quite recognizable and familiar, very similar to traditional web content that we all know and love.

ePub and web content share a number of important commonalities:

(more…)

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.

(more…)

By Jon Noring

AAP’s recent open letter strongly supporting the use of ePub by publishers was covered by David Rothman in a separate blog article.

Reading the letter, it was unclear to me whether AAP supported ePub as a consumer format. The letter focused mostly on using ePub as an intermediary format to be converted by wholesalers and retailers into various proprietary end-user formats currently in vogue.

The letter did imply support of ePub as a consumer format, by the use of the word “IF” in the second paragraph, but it was not explicit and some might have interpreted the letter differently. If so, they should read the clarification by Ed McCoyd, the Director of Digital Policy at AAP, who signed the AAP open letter. With his permission I am quoting part of his reply to the letter I wrote him:

(more…)

By Jon Noring

Since interest in the new IDPF EPub e-book open standard appears to be growing by leaps and bounds, I’ve started a new Yahoo Group for detailed discussions about EPub, called EPub Community.

EPub Community is intended for publication creators, developers, readers, and anyone else interested in all things related to EPub and the IDPF specifications which underlie EPub (OPS/OPF/OCF). Although the group’s focus is likely to be fairly technical, we certainly invite and encourage non-technical discussions. More generic discussions about e-books, and other non-EPub-related discussions, can happen at Book Futures, The eBook Community or Digital Text Community.

Subscription info: Sign up via the Web or send a blank e-mail to epub-community-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.

(more…)