The name makes me think of uranium and radiation, the proprietary DRM issue remains, and Apple isn’t a supporter. But the Readium initiative, announced this morning, is a still big step forward for the International Digital Publishing Forum, the main e-book industry trade group. A demo reader mixes ePub 3 e-book format, XML, HTML5 standards and the WebKit rendering engine used in many Web browsers. Aided by this “reference implementation, developers will more easily be able to create ePub reading software with “support for video, audio, interactivity, vertical writing and other global language capabilities, improved accessibility, MathML, and styling and layout enhancements” (link added). Demos already exist as extensions for Chromium...

I was just looking back at a post I made in August of 2006—my first post here as a regular contributor, in fact. This came well before the advent of the Kindle, and was sparked off by a discussion of e-book piracy on the eBook Community email list. It’s interesting to look back on it in light of the sea change in e-book demand brought about largely by the Kindle, Nook, and (more recently) iPad. The article was a discussion of the relative e-piracy situations between music, movies, and e-books. My thesis was that, at the time the article...

Welcome to TeleRead’s newest contributor, John Schember, a member of the team behind the wonderful Calibre program for managing e-book collections. His bio appears at the end. Calibre is much improved, and I myself am in the middle of Calibre-izing my own collection. Screenshot to the right is from me---don’t blame John for any of the reading choices. – D.R. E-book readers are becoming more and more common. Two of the most popular today are the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader line. Unfortunately the two different brands don’t read the same kinds of e-books. This mess is...

Note: Chris Meadows also covered this story earlier this week. Adobe DRM will get some loving attention from me in a post later this week. Meanwhile guess which topics come up in a Slate piece on Black Friday deals as bait for suckers? Clashing e-book formats and DRM. I’m very, very pleased to see Slate’s Farhad Manjoo warning Black Friday fans about the hazards of the Tower of eBabel, as we at TeleRead say from time to time. I hope he’ll start using the same term. While deploring...

ePub is the magic that will rescue us from the crumbling Tower of eBabel and give us e-books that Just Work. Or not. Here is the experience of a simple-minded publisher who believed what he was told about ePub. Perhaps there are some morals to be drawn. But if I'm not simple-minded, just simple--- please correct me gently! The book I'm formatting as an e-book is a collection of short stories. Here's a link to one of them, so you can follow my reasoning if you want. The formatting of these stories...

No one loves the idea of the ePub e-book format---especially at the consumer level---more than I do. I applaud Sony’s just-revealed decision to use only ePub in its store by the end of 2009. I myself helped found the OpenReader Consortium, and its OpenReader format in turn led the Internatonal Digital Publishing Fourm to create ePub so the IDPF wouldn’t be preempted. But try to puzzle out a New York Times item by Brad Stone. The headline over his piece reads: Sony Plans to Adopt Common Format for E-Books. Alas, however, we’re still talking in effect about...

For e-reading, I’ve had good luck with my Acer Aspire One with a 120G hard disk, 1G of memory, WiFi, an 8.9-inch WSVGA display and Win XP. But some e-bookers might prefer a more rugged XP model with a 16G solid-state drives. $199 for the reconditioned solid-state model at uBid isn’t an incredible price, but it certainly isn’t a gouge. You’ll be able to download books directly and read them with a variety of programs ranging from FBReader to Adobe Reader. Of course, I’d rather go with a linux netbook, but thanks to the Tower of eBabel,...

I started TeleRead in the 1990s to fight for well-stocked national digital library systems in the U.S. and elsewhere---a cause that I still love. Most librarians even years later aren’t ready for the TeleRead idea. But I can tell you what does count as an e-book issue for our well-educated readers from a variety of occupations: digital rights management. So does the Tower of eBabel, all those clashing e-book formats, some of which may fade away, leaving book-owners stranded when they move on to new hardware or when their existing devices break. What’s more, for months, on and off, the...

E-book glitches: Readers care, and even 99.95 percent accuracy isn’t good enough. ePub progress: Lots of it at Random House. And next month Bookeen will unveil the new Cybook Opus, able to read Adobe-DRMed ePub and PDF. Readers’ like and dislikes: Plenty of passion on the DRM issue. Those are among the tidbits showing up in presentations now downloadable from the IDPF’s May 12 Digital Book 2009 conference. “Today’s e-book consumer has higher standards than ever before,” notes a PDF submitted by Liisa McCloy-Kelley,...

Both Paul and David have posted their opinions on the ePub standard and on cross-platform DRM today, so I might as well post my own incoherent ramblings. (I’m half-zoned on Percocet right now due to having gotten two new pins put into my leg yesterday, so I hope they make sense.) Amazon & ePub Paul makes some good points in his post. I think e-book fans tend to forget that, from the outside, e-books are a confusing mess. We take our own expertise for granted—but the average consumer might think that ePub is a place where you...

As if you didn’t know already, no party line exists at TeleRead, and yesterday’s post by Co-Editor Paul Biba is a good example---the one where he knocks ePub and talks up cross-platform DRM. What’s more, he is all too tolerant of Amazon as it exists now. Yawner if we all agree on everything, right? Ahead are reminders of why we need ePub but not cross-platform DRM, or Amazon’s currently obnoxious ways of doing business. ePub: A must First, the arguments for ePub: 1. Paul is more sophisticated technically than the average user, regardless...

Follett has unveiled a new e-reading app with K-12 and libraries in mind. So what format(s) is Follett using? Can the app handle the ePub e-book standard? If not, why not? If I oversaw tech for a school or library system, I'd try to shun Follett Digital Reader---unless the Follett app can read ePub, the standard on which major publishers are counting to lower production costs and reduce the complexities of E for consumers. An FAQ from Follett, alas, mentions an .fdr extension. Isn't that just what schools and libraries need: another occupant of the Tower of eBabel?...