If OpenReader is really an idealized OEB, ver 1.5 or ver 2.0, do we really need OpenReader? Shouldn’t there just be knockdown dragout fights at the former Open eBook Forum, the redubbed IDPF? Even before it sheds its standards role to become more like an electronic-publishing trade organization, it’s plausible that IDPF may be good for one more round of e-book specs.
That’s a powerful argument for keeping OpenReader from becoming institutional and birthing a new e-book spec. Politics shouldn’t force a secession except in extreme circumstances.
I think that if OpenReader has a justification, it’s because OEB — and, honestly, OpenReader as now propounded — are so behind the times they are irrelevant.
Authoring in Project Gutenberg’s wiki-minimal formatting suffices for the 19th-century model of plow-ahead no-frills linear texts. HTML+CSS works for more-layout-oriented content, as does PDF, and CHM handles the more website-structured, FAQ-type and Help/Index/reference model satisfactorily. The internationally developed, cross-platform OpenDocument has a widespread basis, with strong commitments to open formats, accessibility, internationalization and contemporary ideas about markup for anti-obscurity. If OpenDocument couldn’t be adapted for e-book use, I’d be flabbergasted.
Then there are the two dark horses, SVG and Flash, both of which incorporate interactivity and multimedia, and which — along with the forthcoming Sophie — lead us into the territory of book-as-wholly-integrated-media-object. What a “book” is in the year 2030 is as likely to fall into the Sophie model as it will the Tolstoy-Hemingway-Updike one that holds sway now.
With these possibilities in front of us, do we really need a new e-book format? Is the sole purpose of an OpenReader simply to counter the multiple-proprietary-formats model that commercial publishing has used during these past few fractured years?
No, I don’t think so. Building on the edifice of one of the existing e-book formats would work for that if that alone is our need.
I say that if OpenReader is necessary, it’s to meet the needs of consumers, publishers and authors alike.
We absolutely do need an open, non-proprietary, accessible format that puts reading first. One that is tailored to publishing content, not office or web-simple documents. One that comes in a single file. One that facilitates interactivity, motion graphics and sound, and permits the author to use content-specific and object-oriented approaches without having to transform the original to deliver it. One that gives the reader/viewer/user access to the source to correct or modify.
OpenReader has a chance to be a formative e-book format, usable for the next ten years, until the Sophie descendants take over (and they will). While books and other texts are mostly texts and XML holds sway, OpenReader ought to push itself forward and do what the other formats cannot or will not.
In the next month or two, we will see how large a vision OpenReader has. Its goals and principles are public now at the OpenReader Consortium site, but these will be restated and hopefully reformulated when a formal standards process is initiated. I hope others will agree that solving last year’s problems should be only part of OpenReader’s ambitions; if e-books are indeed “back” and about to explode exponentially,* then the map needs to have more than one route and more than one goal and a lot more ways to satisfy what authors, readers and publishers might want.
* Most of the evidence is based on the appearance of so many new e-ink e-readers and small general devices like the Nokia 770 and UMPC’s, and not on specific new demand for e-books having popped up.
Part 1 of What’s the point of OpenReader is found here.
Very provocative comments. I completely agree that the broader principles behind an “OpenReader” vision aren’t served by focusing on just forking an OEBPS variant, especially now that IDPF moving rapidly in evolving OEBPS, addressing many (though not all) of the needs you enumerated, including single-file packaging, SVG, and accessibility. As you point out, other requirements can be addressed by existing formats: you mention PDF, an obvious choice for final-form paginated content, and I would submit that Flash SWF makes sense for interactivity, motion graphics, and sound.
IMO OpenReader’s primary contribution may turn out to be acting as a kind of guard-rail, prodding the standards process underway in IDPF to work as designed, and keeping developers of other de jure and de facto standards (including us at Adobe wrt PDF and Flash SWF) on their toes with respect to openness. Such an ombudsman/advocacy role would in and of itself be a very valuable contribution to the future of publishing.
The OpenReader folks keep talking about DRM being a differentiator for them, which I just don’t get. The absence of DRM is not a differentiator, since many formats, including OEBPS and PDF, can be DRM-free. Anyway they aren’t talking about being DRM-free, but rather some kind of “friendly DRM”. And given the IP mine-fields around DRM it’s not clear how an open source effort could usefully address this area. If this is not just posturing, I would love to hear some specifics.
Interesting comments, Bill. OpenReader can challenge OEB, even call OEB pigheaded and antique without necessarily meaning it should disappear. And there’s historical precedence for this with Relax NG and W3C XML Schemas. The former borrows from the latter and appeared only after dissatisfaction with the W3C offering. But really, the world needs both it seems.
Given that thinking — and I’m not being ironic in my comments above, just trying not to pretend there are not differences of opinion as well as approach — would Adobe sign on to an OASIS effort to produce an OpenReader spec? Seriously. OpenReader can only benefit from the broadest range of thinking and from consensus building, and your perspective would clearly broaden things and let the consensus-building process shake out a lot more issues than otherwise.
PS: Don’t ask me about DRM. I don’t know how it would work, how it could work, or why it’s even worth trying to make it work. I favor a DRM-less world. If somebody is selling your work as their own, use copyright law to sue them. And don’t bother trying to police book readers. (True story. A friend checked out a first novel from the library of an unknown author. I happened to pick it up and read it too. Two reads, no purchase. Bad thing in DRM-think. Good thing in more-readers-equal-more-sales thinking. Now it’s years later, and I’ve spent maybe $100 – $125 on the author’s subsequent books. Oh, and two copies of that first book as well. Publishers know that word of mouth is good, so they pass out books free at BookExpo. Seems to me the same is true for e-books. Without DRM you just have to monetize the investment slightly differently.)