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By David Rothman

VitalSource BookshelfThe guys at OSoft love to brag about dotReader‘s shared annotations and highlighting—so students and teachers, for example, can swap insights or bafflement over a passage in Ulysses. But what if a rival e-reader from a well-financed company like Ingram already has such capabilities or soon will?

In fact, when I gave VitalSource Bookshelf 4.5 a very quick spin this morning, I saw the shared-highlights wrinkle mentioned in a menu, and I’m assuming that the shared notes will be on the way soon if they’re not present already. Certainly, there are different levels of sharing—with friends, with a class, with the world, for instance—and it’ll be interesting to learn how BookShelf stacks up with dotReader in that regard. So far, I just see a place to put “friends” on a subscription list, and, of course, there are other issues for use on and off campus such as whether an e-reader can support ads (one way to lower textbook costs for students). We know that Adobe is doing ads and will be getting more and more into collaborative features.

In my very quick test drive of Bookshelf—which reached Ingram via last year’s acquisition of VitalSource—here’s what I liked:

–Books were iPod-easy to download and apparently can be easily restored. On different machines? I don’t know the full DRM situation.

–The interface was adequate for most academic uses and offered several views, my favorite of which was Reader, which allowed me to use my mousewheel to change pages. It was a snap to insert notes and highlights for personal access. Nice going, Vital Source!

–You can search your entire library at once, a feature that dotReader will have.

OCLC as a prospect for VitalSourcel

If VitalSource can polish BookShelf’s interface for the consumer market, and if it can do a PDA version, this software could be an interesting possibility for OCLC‘s NetLibrary—given VitalSource interest in the institutional market. Of course, the real answer isn’t .vbk (“patented format”) but a standard format. I’ll be most interested in seeing if VitalSource grows serious about the IDPF‘s standards, and also if the company can take an interest in such OpenReaderish issues as reliable interbook linking and DRM interoperability. More immediately, what about the capability to import your own books from .txt, HTML and other common public domain formats? On top of that, we’re probably deep in Proprietary Land. I doubt that BookShelf is open source.

As a Mobi rival

While BookShelf has its pluses, it isn’t nearly as nice for recreational reading as, say, Mobipocket, and, unfortunately, it won’t run on PDAs. Is Ingram about to unveil some surprises shortly? I wouldn’t be surprised, at least if it wants to compete with Mobipocket and be Ingram-owned Lightning Source‘s featured format. Meanwhile, though, I’m disappointed that BookShelf tucks print-size-size changes within an Edit menu and apparently won’t let you change fonts, a big annoyance to me. Mobi is surely much kinder to e-book newbies and veterans alike, right now; let’s see if that changes. In my e-book nirvana, experience users would have as many choices as they do in, say, PalmFiction reader.

Good enough for Elsevier

That said, the Bookshelf software seems easily good enough to have drawn major customers such as Elsevier, which markets the program as Evolve Select–the reason why VitalSource and Bookshelf’s .vbk format may not be so well known in the general e-book community and among public librarians, as opposed to academic niches, including those related to professional training in areas such as dentistry. (Google search for Evolve Select is here.) As noted earlier in this blog, maybe VitalSource-format books have drawn a billion downloads. If so, however, the company needs to make a better case than it did in its less-than-fully-helpful news release.

Related: VitalSource CEO Frank Daniels III’ 2005 presentation to an IDPF educational conference (PDF) and a BusinessWeek video interview with him this month.

 
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