I remain opposed to DRMed e-books, at least for nonlibrary purposes; but in the interest of fairness, here are thoughts from Adobe’s Bill McCoy, adapted with permission from a Reading 2.0 post. Civil replies, please. I myself liked a blog post Bill did where he personally championed social DRM. Let’s hope that Adobe will officially give the SDRM idea a shot---I see a little hope. – D.R. Adobe's interests are far more aligned with the adoption of open formats that we can address with our authoring tools and services. We see e-book DRM as an enabler for a...

EPUB, not just PDF, can be a path to visually rich books. Contrary to misunderstandings, for example, the IDPF’s format standard for e-books does support inline charts and graphs well. In particular, EPUB supports SVG which is, not coincidentally, a very close analog to PDF page contents. So anything one can represent on a PDF page or portion thereof can be represented in  EPUB, with real, selectable text and scalable vector graphics.  A progressive academic journal provider, Hindawi Publishing has developed an innovative workflow that results in EPUB with inline SVG for mathematical...

Moderator: The Stanza e-book reader for the iPhone lets you call up catalogs from a number of sites, including commercial stores. But what if many other e-book readers had this capability? Lexcycle, Stanza’s developers, wants an Atom-based standard for this to happen---a great idea. And Lexcycle has a powerful new ally in Adobe’s Bill McCoy. I’ll be curious to see what if any response Amazon or Google will have, in words or strategy. – D.R. Stanza, the leading iPhone eBook software, includes an excellent online catalog system that enables users to seamlessly acquire free and commercial content from within the...

In the U.S., some mass paperbacks carried ads---partly because of distribution via magazine rack-jobbers. This channel was much better paced for time-dependent ad-supported publications than bookstores and libraries. But will ads work in e-books? Adobe has experimented with enabling dynamic contextual ads including in offline-readable publications, most recently with an "Ads for Adobe PDF" Labs pilot. This remains of interest to us, but to date we have seen little interest from book publishers. Across the spectrum, from trade to academic to textbook, there has been a lot of concern about diluting the value proposition of their premium content...

Earlier I raised the issue of how many e-books Amazon was selling that were truly commercial. I'm not the only one. Here are personal opinions of Adobe's Bill McCoy, adapted with his permission from the Reading 2.0 e-mail list. - D.R. Apple is unlikely to be able to pull an iPod here, but not because Amazon has any kind of insurmountable lead in e-book selection. I don’t think that’s the case, not at all. First, the selection of commercially relevant e-books at the Kindle Store is still very thin. Less coverage of what really sells in trade...

Google, Others Contest Copyright Warnings, in the Wall Street Journal, notes a pending complaint that the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) , a trade group in which Google, Microsoft and others are members, is filing about copyright notices that, according to the CCIA, misled users by not noting legitimate fair-use reproduction rights. What Google's role, if any, in the complaint is not entirely clear, but it certainly seems ironic that Google is being associated with this complaint, at the same time as they are putting putting highly misleading notices on scanned public domain works. Supposedly "essential" watermark The Google notice, found...

Moderator's note: Cory Doctorow wonders if novels are "screeny" enough for long reads. Here's an adaptation of a rebuttal that Bill McCoy, an e-booker at Adobe, published on an e-mail list. The young woman in the CC-licensed photo is reading from a PSP. - David Rothman Neither the fiction nor narrative non-fiction of the future will be limited to long-form texts intended to be read immersively in a primarily linear manner---that's my opinion. At the same time, I would like to express disbelief at the proposition that digital content will not within the foreseeable future be an acceptable alternative to paper...

Moderator's note: We welcome Adobe's Bill McCoy as a regular contributor. The TeleBlog will be publishing a diversity of viewpoints. - David Rothman The OpenReader Consortium was formed in early 2004 as a grass-roots effort to foster the development of an open, non-proprietary next-generation eBook standard, based on and addressing key limitations of the then-stagnant IDPF OEBPS. The OpenReader vision was to end the "Tower of eBabel" of incompatible proprietary formats that has plagued the nascent digital publishing industry. Recently there has been some strife between leaders of the OpenReader effort. One of them, David Rothman of TeleRead, has suggested...