Plucker and Web-based e-books: Musings from PARC's Bill Janssen

Project Gutenberg books were once the bane of people who wanted little trifles like italics and boldface.

Some Gutenberg books were in HTML and so on. But no single format was available from PG with the niceties for most of the thousands of classics and other works.

The Plucker difference

Then along came Plucker (Web site here). It not only lets you capture Web sites but also display books with the HTML-level amenities.

Granted, Plucker runs on Palms but not Pocket PCs, and polished and stable versions for desktop and laptop PCs and Macs apparently don’t exist. What’s more, I’d wouldn’t mind some new wrinkles in the interface and other usability improvements. But Plucker is here, it works, and it’s one more eBabler that commercial publishers might want to check out while also keeping an eye on the IDPF‘s new standard. In fact, the Creative Commons version of Blood, Sweat & Tea, a commercial book shown here, appeared in Plucker on a now-down site and is still available in that and other formats via manybooks.net.

Plucker, Web-based e-books and the future

So what’s ahead for Plucker?

Bill Janssen at PARC, a regular TeleBlog commenter and a major contributor to Plucker’s truly open-source community, shared some thoughts yesterday on Plucker and the future as he himself sees it—Web-based e-books, which he thinks could reduce the need for Plucker. And I’ll reproduce Bill’s words for people who are following the main part of the TeleBlog via our full RSS feed:

Clearly web-based e-books are the wave of the future. The interesting thing about Plucker, which the e-book-centric folk tend not to understand immediately, is that Plucker is not an e-book reader. It’s a system, intended to capture Web sites well enough to make them readable offline. As such, it’s positioned to capitalize on the move to e-books deployed as Web sites, and actually has a future, unlike formats, software, and hardware targeted at the failed last-century model of downloadable off-line e-books encrypted in proprietary document formats.

It turns out that the Plucker format is pretty well-suited to the old and failed e-book download in a special format game, well-suited enough that PG put in an automatic “transcribe-to-Plucker” function in their Web site. But that’s really a side-effect of good design for its primary purpose, the capture of Web sites for off-line reading.

Now, it’s not perfect. It’s old, and showing its age. A next-generation version of a system like Plucker will have to have a tricky ECMAscript interpreter as part of it, which will do appropriate things to parts of the site when invoked off-line. And increasingly, off-line won’t be an option—a real connection to the Web site will be required. So Plucker will, over time, become less and less useful. [Link added.]

I myself am horrified at the prospect of having to be online all the time to enjoy books, with no other choice available, given the risk of E-Book Museums—with less user control over content. Who’s to say that companies or, yes, Washington or other national governments, won’t deprive you of access to books? And what to do if you’re too poor for a reliable Internet connection or live out in the middle of nowhere, so the only alternative is an expensive satellite connection? I’d welcome Bill’s addressing these issues. If alternatives are available, however, yes, I do like the browser-based idea, and meanwhile Plucker might be a handy form of transitional technology.