Distributing online books via ebrary‘s Dynamic Content Platform (DCP) will be Oxford University Press, Brill Academic Publishers, Manchester University Press, SAGE Publications, and Artech House. But how durable will the PDF-oriented infrastructure be? Could the OpenReader approach make it obsolete despite ebrary’s PDF-to-EDF approach to facilitate reading on a variety of platforms? Libraries in the end will want nonproprietary standards to keep costs down. That’s what OpenReader is all about. Since when have you used the old Prodigy or CompuServe infrastructure? Same concept here–an Internet equivalent for digipubs, so to speak, except we’re talking about a format rather than a network of networks.
Interestingly, the CEO and CTO of ebrary is none other than Christopher Warnock, son of John Warnock, founder of Adobe. So which comes first–technology or filial loyalty? Of course, the door is very much open for Adobe itself to participate in OpenReader, and quite unofficially, someone from the company has even contributed to an OpenReader email list. We hope more people from Adobe and other big players will take an interest and help give the entire e-book industry the boost it needs.
