More on TechnologyTell: Gadget News | Apple News
Harlequin’s Mike Smith about to be the new IDPF exec director?
October 19, 2007 | 12:24 am
|
By David Rothman
Is Mike Smith—who’s a lot more clueful about e-books than you might think from his old-fashioned title, typesetting supervisor at Harlequin—about to be the new executive director of the International Digital Publishing Forum?
The eyes of the TeleBlog are everywhere. While I can’t say absolutely for sure, I’m almost sure. I’ve e-mailed Mike to pin this down.
What I like about Mike, based on what I know of him and Harlequin, is that he can appreciate the possibilities of interactivity as a way to bring readers closer to writers and publishers.
I just hope that Mike presence’s at the IDPF will loosen up publishers’ purse strings and build their confidence in .epub. Financially and in other ways, the IDPF needs to put a little more distance between Adobe and itself—in the interest of standards purity and credibility. Adobe has made useful contributions galore. But when one company dominates the IDPF financially and in other ways, that’s hardly the best way to advance .epub as a vendor-neutral standard.
Among the issues for Mike, or whoever becomes the exec director, should be:
–A good validation tool for .epub.
–.epub logo (starting with one for nonDRMed .epub and moving on to an all-inclusive logo if/when the DRM interoperability issue is settled).
–Reliable interbook linking.
–Encouragement of major publishers to experiment with new approaches such as social DRM, or, gasp, no DRM.
–More format-related handholding for smaller publishers. Is it possible that the IDPF could even help finance the development of an open source Open Office plug-in or something else for .epub creation?
Technorati Tags: Mike Smith , IDPF , International Digital Publishing Forum , Harlequin
|
Previous
SUBSCRIBE TO RSS
Comments:
Although I agree about the need for a validation tool, in fact, it is a lot more complicated than one might think. epub consists of several standards (css, ops, dtb). I for one would be happy with just a OPS validator.
Good point, Robert, although the IDPF could at least do things incrementally. I’m impatient to see the logo. But first it’ll help for there to be a way to make sure a company has earned it. Perhaps the IDPF could authorize companies to set up reasonably priced validation services. Thanks. David
If IDPF could only do one thing (more), what I’d really like to see is a .epub macro for either Word or OpenOffice. Come on, guys. There’s an OpenOffice save-as for PDF, for Palm DOC, for Word, and for XML DocBook. I’m betting that all of the basics are there for someone with a bit of programming. If I had this, I’d make the BooksForABuck.com back-list available in .epub within a couple of weeks. So, what do you think, Mike?
Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com