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Now online: E-book glitch wisdom, Random’s ePub progress, ePub Cybook news, other IDPF conf tidbits
May 18, 2009 | 5:36 am
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By David Rothman
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, VP director of Random House’s Content Management Group.
“Garbage In, Garbage out. 99.95 percent accuracy still has 250 errors in an average book. 99.990 percent accuracy has 50 errors. 99.998 percent accuracy has 10 errors and is close to what we find in print. People do judge books by their covers. A negative review about the formatting of an e-book still looks negative to the author and to readers."
The above caught my eye even though it was more or less just an aside. It’s tough enough to keep errors down when producing books for a single format—hence, the attractiveness of the ePub standard, compared to the current jumble of formats, aka the Tower of eBabel.
On the ePub front, McCloy-Kelley said: ”We changed workflow and processes and vendors to supply ePub only as of Jan 2009.
“We have instituted an eBook correction process.
“We’re working to transform every eBook to ePub by mid-2009."
Random House’s standard XML—from which conversions can be made—is "a subset of DocBook" (link added).
Good stuff, Liisa! And let’s hope that ePub will keep gaining traction as a consumer format, not just one for publishers to send on to distributors and retailers.
Links to other presentations
The ePub update panel (other members): Bob Carlton, Libre Digital’s vice president of marketing; Sandeep Dhawan, Aptara, vice president; Dave Cramer, XML architect at TexTech.
ePub sales and distribution panel: Bob LiVolsi, president, Books on Board; Erica Lazzaro, general counsel, OverDrive; Andrew Weinstein, vice president and general manager, retail solutions, Ingram Digital. Comparing popularity (downloads at Books on Board or ggeneral stats?), Bob LiVolsi gave these stats: Adobe, 54 percent (ePub and PDF combined?); Mobipocket, 20 percent; Microsoft Reader, 17 percent; and eReader 9 percent. Hmm. I’m surprised that Microsoft Reader is so close to Mobipocket, but could that be partly because many e-book connoisseurs regard the former’s DRM as among the easiest to strip (normally for nonpiracy purposes such as backup and use on a variety of devices).
Among devices (BooksOnBoard or general?), PCs led (80 percent), followed by dedicated e-book readers (around 13 percent), iPhones (perhaps 4 percent), Palms (2 percent) and others (9 percent). Not sure if these add up, but that’s what the numbers seem to be. Overlapping users?
Emerging e-book business models and the emergence of DRM: Andrew Savikas, O’Reilly Media vice presient of digital initiatives; Angela James, executive editor, Samhain Publishing; Sameer Shariff, founder and CEO, Impelsys, Inc.; and Susan Danziger, president and publisher, DailyLit.
Consumer wants: Michael Santangelo, electronic resources specialist, Brooklyn Public Library; Sara Wendell, co-creator and co-author, Smart Bitches, Trashy Novels blog; Malle Vallik, director, digital content and interactivity, Harlequin.
E-reader hardware and software update: Laurent Picard, founder, Bookeen, the company behind the Cybook; Jordan Christensen, product manager, Shortcovers; Neelan Choksi, chief operating offier, Lexcyle; and Nick Bogaty, senior development manager, digital publshing, Adobe Systems.
From Bookeen, here are the specs for the new Cybook Opus to be unveiled in June: “Lightest device: 5.3 oz. Highest def.: 200 dpi. Storage capacity: 1GB. Fits in a pocket. One handed operable. Adobe ePub/PDF. 12 different font sizes. Customizable layout. Folder management. Motion sensor.”
Technorati Tags: Random House
Ice cream sign photo: CC-licensed from KB35.
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Comments:
Just a reminder — and given her work with ebooks at Random House for the last ten years, something you probably want to keep in mind — that Liisa McCloy-Kelley spells her first name with two i’s.
As a volunteer at Distributed Proofreaders, I can understand how hard it is to get rid of the last .5% errors. However, I’ve been waiting several weeks now for Harper Collins to fix the eReader version of Edith Grossman’s translation of Don Quixote, all of the footnotes refer to the footnotes in the preface, rather than the actual footnotes for each chapter. That’s just sloppy conversion of the internal files used to generate the printed book to ebook.
Roger, great catch! Fixed. The IDPF page misspelled Liisa M-K’s name, but, yes, the presentation does use “Liisa.” I’ll drop IDPF Exec Director Mike Smith a note so he, too, can spell the name right. Was LM-K’s mother a copy editor? Did she name her daughter in a way to justify CEs’ existence?
Thanks. David
Thanks to Bruce for volunteering at Distributed Proofreaders, an organization that provides an excellent example of crowdsourcing. I wish more publishers and authors would take advantage of myriad eyes by providing an easy way to report typos. The Kindle and other ebook readers could have a small link on each page or a drop-down menu to report typos and grammatical lacunas. This wireless feedback could help to achieve “five nines” (99.999%) or “six nines” of orthographic wholesomeness.
Even this fine blog would benefit from a streamlined error-reporting procedure with a dedicated typo-flagging link.
Roger Sperberg reports that “Liisa McCloy-Kelley spells her first name with two i’s.” That is a tricky spelling. Liisa illustrates the difficulty of removing typos with her own slide presentation. She quotes Jacob Weisberg of Slate, and she spells his name Jacob Weisburg [sic]. (Yes, I realize that my own comments have not yet achieved “one nine” reliability.)