If:Book offers a nice, open-minded writeup on dotReader, which will offer the first implementation of the OpenReader standard. Thanks, Ben. I like Sophie, too. The aesthetics are superb; the multimedia capabilities, impressive; and I especially appreciate the strong interest in creation by users. Sophie in a sense is dotReader’s sister—both are interactive and have the potential to change the meaning of “book,” at least when writers and publishers desire this. Let me repeat: interactivity isn’t for every book or every writer, but increasingly it will be part of publishing,

Still coming: Sophie screen shots. I’ve been swamped, and I assume that if:book’s Bob Stein, source of the forthcoming shots, has been as well.

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5 COMMENTS

  1. I particularly liked this part:

    In many ways it feels like a web browser that’s been customized for books. I can definitely see it someday becoming a fully web-based app. The recently released Firefox 2 has a bunch of new features like live bookmarks (live feed headlines in drop-down menus on your bookmarks toolbar) and a really nice embedded RSS reader. It’s a pretty good bet that online office suites, web browsers and standalone reading programs are all on the road to convergence.

    which I read as his saying that dotReader (along with most other e-reader programs like MobiPocket) is already well on the way to being obsolete, outmoded by the incredible cultural pressure behind Web browsers and Web sites.

    Though I think there’s a ray of hope in this analysis, for readers, at least. The only way to make proprietary (actually, I think I mean non-Web) formats and software effective will be to embed them in special-purpose hardware systems — which may mean that we’ll see a wide variety of wacky (and unsuccessful) proprietary hardware devices for reading in the not-so-far future!

  2. I’m a little baffled, Bill. Here’s dotReader, which can be made to read most any XMLish format in creation, and you’re grouping it with Mobipocket? Of course, if you want to ascribe the best capabilities of browsers to dotReader, I’ll go along with that—for example, interbook linking and lots and lots of interactivity. Oh, and by the way, I continue to remain enthusiastic about someone getting Plucker going on the dotReader. Methinks OpenReader has the most potential for books, but let the market choose. Thanks. David

  4. re: XMLish formats:

    As I understand the OpenReader format is a subset of XHTML.
    Doesn’t that mean that all we need to display it is a web browser? In fact that’s what’s dotReader is doing. They have IE embedded on Windows and Mozilla on other platforms.

    I see their point in building portable code that can be run on devices, but if we’re thinking about desktop users then wouldn’t it be better just to have a Firefox extension? Then we could the full power of the browser to find books online, download them, buy them from webshops, bookmark, annotate etc.

    The extra that we need is a small personal library that manages offline content, something like Zotero (www.zotero.org) plus the ability to upload to an eBook reader device.

  5. Actually, the OpenReader format supports a subset of XHTML 1.1. This is not the same as being a subset.

    Specifically, the OpenReader format, like OEBPS, is more like an organized web site, where a publication can be represented by one or more content documents (in the XHTML 1.1 subset), and optionally include CSS, image files, etc. Everything is tied together using the Binder document (in OEBPS the Package), which performs a variety of functions. It is the Binder which makes the publication a lot more powerful than an ordinary web site.

    Regarding rendering an OpenReader Publication — yes it is possible to use a web browser to do so (with appropriate tweaks such as a plug-in to keep track of the “bookkeeping” stuff in the Binder.)

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