booktwo.org

O’Reilly’s Tools of Change for Publishing blog has a nice series of posts on books as ebooks as applications:

• Linking Books with the Web-Way of Thinking
• Treating Ebooks Like Software
• A Big Boost to Books as Apps?

I just want to voice something that has been bothering me a little about this (and given some current projects, may come back to bite me):

Books are not applications, or software. They are words.

I think there’s a danger inherent in regarding books as something to be run rather than something to be read. This argument is a bit hazy because a lot of book apps (such as booksinmyphone’s Java apps) are really just wrappers for the text.

But by creating multiple versions of books – rather than agreeing on a single format (e.g. but not necessarily, ePub) and building separate software to display that – we’re heading down a road of locked-down, device-specific book technology that is antithetical to the nature of the medium, and costly to publishers. If only those publishers that can afford to spend the time (not necessarily money, the time alone has a cost) creating huge ranges of different applications can get their books onto the marketplace, it won’t be the rosy future for niche literature that some versions of the ebook story predict.

The sheer replication involved – reproducing the same lines of code over and over again for each book in a library – bothers even my low sense of efficiency and programmatic elegance too.

Of course, this development is not of the choosing of anyone in books. It’s a short-termist, technological hack, to get books onto closed platforms like the iPhone and other smart phones, and in large part it’s caused by the development of the App Store, which provides us with a sneaky way of getting book texts onto phones while there’s no equivalent of the iTunes Store for text files. But I’d much rather see a Book Store selling files to be read by standalone ereader apps than this glut of mini-apps.

Such a path would not prevent publishers building their own, branded and self-promoting, ereader apps, as I’ve previously suggested, but it would massively widen the interoperability of ebooks and ereaders, which readers will only thank us for. Perhaps we should be looking at some other hacks instead?

With little fanfare, if:book released a very early version of Sophie, their rich content creation tool, last Wednesday. You can download it here. Sophie has been described variously as the next step in ebooks, a publishing tool for the rest of us, the first base of the networked book, so I was eager to see what it actually was.

After a short time playing around with it, I pretty much gave up. I’d show you the result, but I can’t figure out how to show it off as there’s no documentation and everything I did manage to do (which wasn’t much) I learnt from this video demo (uploaded to YouTube for ease of viewing, from this source). There’s something in the menus about ‘publish book for Apache server’, but that spewed out a bunch of files with no information on what to do with them.

Here’s some screenshots of the interface, the only useful menu, and the ‘halo’ tool configuration:

I’m not sure what’s being created here. Is this a standalone document creator? There’s very little you can do to your content once it’s in Sophie, so you need external text and image editors for most things (for example, I couldn’t work out how to search-and-replace the incorrectly-encoded apostrophes in my Gutenberg source text). Most of the tools are very simple, but then so are the results – this looks like a CD-ROM creator circa 1993. Because, er, that’s what it is…

Sophie’s either sixteen years in the making or nearly three depending on whether you go back to the beginning or not. The beginning was at The Voyager Company, an early electronic publisher … Back in 1992 Voyager released the Expanded Books Toolkit which enabled people to make simple e-books without any programming… Shortly thereafter, Voyager Japan released T-2 which has gone on to become the leading ebook software in its home country. In 1996 a group of Voyager employees formed Night Kitchen with the intent of creating an authoring/reading environment that would extend the Expanded Books Toolkit concept to include rich media. The result TK3 never officially came to market… The Mellon Foundation approached some of the TK3 team and asked them to build a new multimedia authoring program which would be open-source and would extend TK3 by enabling time-based events… That became Sophie. [Source]

Can you imagine the code? It’s clearly inspired by existing rich media applications such as Flash, but it’s target users – the technologically unskilled – don’t use such applications. How are they supposed to get their heads around concepts such as ‘flows’, ‘timelines’ and different server versions? And if they do get that, why aren’t they using the existing apps?

It’s all very disappointing, and I think if:book know it, which is why they haven’t supported or trumpeted this release in any way. But if they’re looking for feedback, here’s some, and we hope it’s constructive:

• Figure out what it’s really for – “Sophie’s raison d’être is to enable people to create robust, elegant rich-media, networked documents without recourse to programming.” Can we get some examples? Are these just tarted-up ebooks, or something more?
• Figure out who wants it – who are these sophisticated but unskilled users? I regularly use Adobe and ex-Macromedia products including Flash, Photoshop, InDesign etc., but I had a hard time figuring out Sophie.
• Make it stand out - I don’t know what differentiates it from other media creation tools. Where’s the killer feature?
• Really open source it – We found the developer site, but there doesn’t appear to much of a community here. The source forge lists about thirty developers, but only about five seem to have done much. What’s going on?
• Smarten it up and Speed it up – it looks terrible and handles worse.

The potential is all there for… something, but I don’t think anyone, least of all its creators, know what. if:book is an academic, not a technical organisation – sorry guys, but I think you’d agree – and this project seems somewhat directionless. As an example, take the comments on the release notice – while there are some questions about the source, most want a long-winded discussion about the theoretical nature of the book.

Yes, this is an alpha release, but it’s still startlingly naked. We need some good examples of what this can do, and at least some basic documentation, to get any kind of a handle on what’s going on.

[UPDATE: Lots of discussion in the comments. Please read on...]

I wrote about Adobe’s Digital Editions, its Adobe Reader-lite for ebook fans, a while back, but until today I hadn’t tried out Microsoft Reader – and what a pig it is.

Admittedly, it’s designed primarily for PDAs (hence the Cleartype technology), but for the flagship eReader product from the largest software company on the planet, you have to be disappointed – and understand why so many people’s first experience of ebooks is such a turn-off that it colours their whole appreciation of the technology.

From the blocky icon to the blurred logotype to the bland interface, the whole experience says ‘cheap’, which can no longer be tolerated in applications just because they’re free. MS Reader is short on features (bookmarks, annotations, highlights) and the ’settings’ consists of five available type sizes – ’smallest’ to ‘largest’ – and the chance to go fullscreen. Despite this, Microsoft Reader-formatted books are amongst the most available and downloaded out there, along with MobiPocket and Adobe, so it’s no wonder people have such low expectations.

The excuse that ebooks are primarily for PDAs doesn’t wash – this is the future format of all books, not just the ones you want to read on the bus. Hardware is currently doing the job of transforming people’s perceptions of ebooks with the elegant Sony Reader, the recently-announced Readius and concepts such as the Turnover, but they need software to match, software that both replicates the experience of reading that most people are comfortable with (clear type, intuitive pagination or smooth scrolling, bookmarking and annotation) and expands on this to provide new features which can only exist in the new technology (glossaries, hyperlinks, personal indexing, to name but a few).

My recent post on Adobe’s Acrobat-disguised-as-an-eReader Digital Editions software drew a response from m’learned friends over at Mobileread. Alexander Turcic pointed out that DE doesn’t only support PDFs, but also the forthcoming Open eBook Publication Structure (OEBPS), a new standard for content creators and consumers – about which the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) has just published a press release.

The new standard also includes a container standard for packaging ebooks (the Open eBook Publication Structure Container Format, or OCF), and is intended to make it easier and cheaper for all concerned. The IDPF and the OEBPS have some fairly heavyweight backers too – Adobe themselves, unsurprisingly, the Hachette Book Group, ebookseller Mobipocket (another of Amazon’s recent acquisitions), Random House, Simon & Schuster, and many others.

But the OEBPS isn’t the only standard available, and this is where it gets interesting. Their main rival, OpenReader, is a non-proprietary standard which nevertheless includes a standardised DRM. At first glance, this sounds counterintuitive to our position on DRM – in general, a bad thing for readers. But the OEBPS’s lack of a standardised DRM means that any publisher can slap their own conditions on the ebooks – meaning, for example, you could only read a particular book on a Sony Reader, just like you can only listen to MP3s from the iTunes store on an iPod. And the presence of people like John Perry Barlow endorsing OpenReader gives us a great deal of hope.

What is without doubt is that a new and consistent standard must be settled upon before the ebook market takes off and the book world gets into a VHS/Betamax type fight. The strength of the web’s open standards community comes from the fact that grassroots organisations had time to flourish before the corporations stepped in. With Adobe’s and the Publishing Conglomerate’s billions depending on this, that won’t be the case here. Both standards are based on XML, but there are many significant differences, and choosing the right one will be crucial for the future of books.

For the technically minded, specifications for both standards are available at www.openreader.org/spec/ and www.idpf.org/oebps/oebps1.2/. Some interesting places to go for more info include OpenReader Director of Strategic Information David Rothman’s blog at www.teleread.org (and his excellent piece in Publisher’s Weekly on the overcomplication of ebooks), and the blog of Abobe’s General Manager of ePublishing Business, Bill McCoy.

Adobe have just dropped the first fruit of their takeover of Macromedia – and it’s book-related. New eReader technology Adobe Digital Editions is a Flash-based Rich Internet Application – that is, it takes all of the online benefits of connectivity and streams them through a pleasant, pervasive interface that lets you interact with things rather than just look at them. Supposedly.

The most impressive thing about it is undoubtedly how easy it is to install and play with. Go have a try over at Adobe Labs. There are plenty of free sample books available there too.

Once launched, it becomes less easy to see why Adobe think DE will “energize the eBook and digital publishing market” – the first impression is of a kind of iTunes bookshelf:

Books download very quickly, and appear as thumbnails in your library. It all looks very nice. However, there doesn’t seem to be very much beyond this: essentially, these are just PDFs, a format that, while pretty, is actually extremely strict and quite limiting. As a result, the reading display, which appears when a book is selected, is nothing to shout about (click for full-size version):

It’s nice and clear – big, obviously – but it’s still got that classic PDF problem: no scrolling. Pages jump from one to the next – like a paper book, admittedly, but counterinuitive and confusing on a screen – and there’s little whitespace, which is how paper books draw the eye to the text and away from the distractions of the margin. And we’re not even going to start on the fact that it appears to be set entirely in sans-serif fonts.

So what’s the difference between this and a regular PDF, apart from a slick, web-based interface (very now)? Not much, that I can see – it’s essentially Acrobat on Flash. Except that the PDFs now come wrapped in another proprietary format, ETD, with all kinds of extra DRM opportunities built in for the publishers.

Proprietary formats are not the future of eBooks, not only because consumers hate intrusive DRM as much as publishers love it, and have consistently shown this by migrating to apps with weaker DRM wherever possible, but because they will want to read their eBooks on a multiplicity of devices, not all necessarily from the same company, and will choose the format which allows them to do this.

This new app offers absolutely no advances on other eReaders – in fact, it’s a step back. Please try harder, Adobe.

Sources: Adobe Press Release, The Book Standard, ZDNet.