Bill McCoy discusses this at great length on this Books 2.0 blog. Here's the fist little bit: I often receive queries like: I am converting the Word file of my book to a PDF (a bit later in epub). To be read on as many devices as possible, is PDF or PDF/A better? PDF/A-1a or PDF/A-1b? This may seem like a rather nit-picky question, and the bottom-line answer is straightforward: stick to PDF/A to maximize portability, and the lower conformance level "b" is fine. But some interesting strategic points are illustrated by the details underlying this answer. ... Technorati Tags: Adobe, e-book, e-books, ebook,...

Bill McCoy has started his own blog, as opposed to the one he used when he was at Adobe, and he calls it Bill McCoy: Books 2.0. He starts off by saying: As well, my work at Adobe these last three years has been centered around a relatively prosaic objective: establishing open standards that enable multi-channel/cross-device distribution of eBooks. For all intents and purposes, this work is done: epub is now firmly established as the industry standard for reflow-centric eBooks. That took a considerable effort, on the part of many people, and I'm really proud that we did it. But......

Bill McCoy, Adobe’s main e-book guy, is leaving the company “in the near future to pursue other opportunities ‘to be determined.’” He is one of many departing the Adobe, which is trimming back 680 jobs out of around 7,600 to help stay afloat in this dismal economy. I wish everyone the best of luck, especially Bill. Among various projects, Bill and his team have been involved with Adobe Reader Mobile SDK, Adobe Content Server, Adobe Digital Editions and Adobe InDesign. Bill sits on the board of the International Digital Publishing Forum, the e-book industry’s main trade group,...

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...

Excerpt from Bill McCoy's blog appears below. Also see earlier TeleRead post. Adobe has just released, under BSD license, EPUBGen, a Java library that generates EPUB. To quote from our digital publishing developer blog: EPUBGen is a Java library that demonstrates EPUB generation from a variety of document formats, and which may be a useful starting point or reference code for other EPUB generation needs. That is to say, it's an effort to promote the development of a variety of tools and workflows. EPUBGen has both 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...

I’m not the only TeleRead guy with a newspaper-related novel. Stephen Walkwalker, one of our newest contributors, has written Say My Name, a thriller about a Boston newspaper guy framed for financial and sexual sins. Steve’s book starts far too slowly. But like a train racing along in the open countryside after a pokey departure from a downtown station, this one really picks up. I can’t wait to read what happens to Steve’s hero, Stanley Branford, the victim of the ID theft. The novel is a Kindle-format book written under the name of Steve Holt. And if...

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...

Here is an excerpt from Adobe e-booker Bill McCoy's new post in his DRM debate with library tech guru Peter Brantley: Now, let me say up front that I don't think ebook DRM is "good good good" any more than I think that of taxation, standing armies, or the proliferation of nuclear technology. But although one may dislike taxation, one may dislike even more the likely consequences of eliminating taxes (diminished schools, roads, law enforcement, ...). Peter's post focused on negative attributes of DRM in isolation. But to me, the important thing is to look...

A DRM debate has started between digilib guru Peter Brantley and Adobe's Bill McCoy. Both sit on the board of the International Digital Publishing Forum, some of whose member companies want an interoperable DRM standard. Peter, executive director of the Digital Library Federation, argues that DRM  isn't worth messing with. Bill undoubtedly will be talking up DRM as useful technology for libraries and other loan-related apps. I just hope he won't be as gung ho about DRM for retail purposes---DRM is a sales toxin that penalizes honest book-buyers without stopping piracy. Bill himself has written the following...

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...

When I was in college I collected 78 RPM phonograph records, primarily jazz records from the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. Either I was good at collecting, or just lucky. I found and acquired several large jazz and blues collections (a total of over 100,000 records, about 25 tons, passed through my fingers), and didn’t lose a dime in the process. I’ve long since given up massively collecting the “old 78’s”, and today have only kept a few favorites. One favorite I kept, a quite rare classic jazz recording from late 1928, is shown to the right. [note 1] My experience...