After looking over a bunch of suggestions (all of them great!), getting feedback from a few people, thinking through the ramifications of the various names, etc., one candidate name is floating to the top of the list:

BookX

It’s a simple name, intended to be pronounced “books”, and includes the “X”, short for XML. This name also allows for a simpler subset of BookX, which may be needed, e.g., “BookX-Lite”. In addition, there are no trademark encumberances to the name, and the bookx.net and bookx.org domains are available. The one downside is that we can’t get bookx.com domain, which is held by an investment company (oddly enough).

What does everyone think of BookX to be the replacement name for “SimpleBook”?

Although I’d like to see publishers think about text-to-speech, they are so overwhelmed as it is producing a publication for visual presentation that they have little energy left to make their publications highly accessible. This is one reason for the Simple Book design, so they don’t have to worry about this yet be able to produce something that should be of high accessibility.

Certainly, I hope those reading this who are familiar with the nuts-n-bolts of accessible markup will look over the Simple Book DTD and suggest any changes/additions to improve it for text-to-speech and tactile (Braille) delivery systems.

http://www.w3.org/TR/speech-synthesis/

Specifically it includes a voice tag. This will allows speech engines to read the book aloud without the need for voice actors and a audio production studio.

Most new E-Book readers include audio out, usually mp3 player function. With SSML the reader could actually read it or even include pronunciation of specific names and titles.

The core to make this happen is the vocabulary itself, so the focus of effort is to get a rich-enough vocabulary that will be useful to meet the 80-20 or 90-10 rule for smaller publishers, and integrate into existing authoring systems. In addition, the vocabulary must be “rigid” enough (no looseness) thereby allowing standardized style sheets and reliable conversion (“perfect rice everytime”). As soon as one allows “loosey-goosey” markup, the system can no longer meet the various requirements and is essentially useless.

I’m sad to see the industry has been so slow in trying, much less adopting, any open standard. I am working on a long-term web programming project and really, really would love to be writing documentation as-I-go, to not miss anything. But no way do I want to create something in a proprietary format, or even XMl (too difficult when I’m already working on something else).

It would be so nice to be able to open up a text editor and simply create content in OpenReader format without having to learn their DTD. The day that happens, the eBook industry will explode!

I am with many people that do NOT want to see books replaced by electronics — it’s harder on the eyes for one thing, and it’s just NOT relaxing (sitting at a computer/sitting where I work — for me the same thing). But the ability to easily read and write documentation and technical books is another thing altogether, when you are working on the computer to begin with (I read programming-language manuals that way).

I enjoy ThoutReader and hope I will soon be able to write the documentation for my project and read it as I go along.

Kudos to you guys for contributing for the benefit of all of us.

Speaking as an author (who creates his own formatted books) and as a web designer, I like the direction you’re going in…

Any plans to work on something for InDesign? We currently publish PDFs from InDesign, and my understanding is that it has built in capability to work with DTDs. My ideal workflow would be to design for PDF and also export a format more e-reader friendly.

At one time I had “unibook.org” (for UniBook) reserved, but that lapsed and it is now taken by a squatter.

OpenBook is too close to Open eBook, etc.

123write — aren’t there other products with ’123′ in it?

RiteBook (or RightBook) — I think of “RiteAid” :^(

BookPress is interesting, but press almost always refers to a publisher, so it may be confusing.

Eprint, I don’t know. I think of Palm, Adobe, and Sony with that.

But the key is to keep thinking, and use the proposed names to spur more creativity. As Mulder might say, there is a name out there (I do like OrcaBook a lot, and will ask Lee, but Lee may want to reserve that for something else.)

I razzed them a bit because their PDFs that they sell aren’t formatted very well for the current crop of eInk eBook readers.

They responded saying that all their books are stored as XML and that they can produce any type of book (print or eBook) that they want. When a dominant eBook format comes out, they would be able to easily support it.