While I own a touch of Google stock, I’ve hardly been shy about the need for the G people to walk and talk open standards. In fact, we shareholders would benefit. An open approach would help the do-no-evil guys to keep the halos glowing. Good PR = good share prices. But what about the advantages of open standards for society at large?

Some of the latest evidence for an open approach in the e-book format area and others comes from Peter Brantley’s blog. He’s director of technology at the California Digital Library. And while this particular blog item doesn’t mention OpenReader by name, it might as well have. Excerpt:

Services such as recommending services; read aloud; textual re-use; personal library creation; personal and social annotation; distributed citation management services for professional and research communities; automated ontology maintenance; contextual cross-media referrals in search retrievals; data-mining to support dynamic research queries and concept mapping; notification and publication services based on technologies such as rss+extensions; linkages to rich, and often freely available pools of journal literature such as NLM’s PubMed; and many other services are not only readily imagined but could easily be constructed, with adequate resources. Technology is not the problem. Coordination and Effort need encouragement and guidance…

To the extent that the Google Library and the OCA [Open Content Alliance] might permit aggregation or distributed searching and retrieval across their collections of out-of-copyright material, services could be built to operate in a federated environment. This would encourage eventual incorporation of European and Asian online libraries, both of which are in formation.

My colleagues and I – at institutions such as Harvard, Berkeley, MIT, Michigan, UCLA, Stanford, and many others – believe that we have a narrow window of time to investigate open services definitions before they risk entrapment in proprietary patterns [italic added]. We believe that an inter-disciplinary, cross-cutting, small, and well focused symposium on new online library services – an open, no-walls conversation – among publishers, digital librarians, technology purveyors, ebook and reading specialists, and a few academic researchers – could energize this potentially explosive market- place.

Update, Jan. 13: A different blog item, dated Jan. 5, does mention OpenReader. It’s obvious that Peter Brantley is in need of an update and demo, just as we’ll undoubtedly benefit from his insights:

One more recent, open solution to the consumer side of this problem is OpenReader, an XML-based format for ebooks, articles, and other publications; arguably it possesses a constraint in utilizing HTML-CSS for presentation applications. OpenReader builds upon the Open eBook Publication Standard first developed and released in 1999 by the (then) Open eBook Forum, now renamed the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). OpenReader might have limitations on production, transfer, presentation, and other functionality that will have to be addressed by new formats.

A “good” enabler of delivery is an open-standard that does not require licensing, is thoroughly documented, and is not owned in a restrictive or proprietary fashion. It should also encourage promiscuity in additive functionality. Essentially, a modular format framework is required that supports easy integration or bolt-on functionality for emergent access and delivery needs. Such a format will also have to recognize that it is unlikely to persist for all future millennia, and to thus attempt to incorporate lossless future-format translation support.

One of the pieces of functionality that I am forced to acknowledge is some form of digital rights management (DRM). The Sony episode has well demonstrated the necessity of having non-invasive, non-intrusive, and privacy-protecting DRM solutions. Being able, as a community, to endorse a truly open DRM solution that recognizes that its goal is to minimize risk of asset loss and not to police behavior would be a hugely successful step in its own right.

1 COMMENT

  1. Imagine Google as a great library. Now imagine in 200 years some archaeologist stumbling upon this vast store of insights and wisdom into our time. But there’s one problem: they can’t read any of it! It’s DRM’d and put in some long-dead format.

    Sort of like when the Europeans looking at Egyptian hieroglyphics, before Champollion found the Rosetta Stone.

    The world’s knowledge needs to be open and readable. Or it will be lost.

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