Blackmask, one of my favorite sites for public domain books, carried a little item about the $99K that Nick Bogaty, executive director of the International Digital Publications Forum, pulls down working from home. Hey, nothing against Nick personally. I just think it’s a shame that the IDPF leadership hasn’t let the group do its job and go for consumer-level standards for e-books. Time to spin standards off to OpenReader and let Nick and the rest concentrate on trade association issues? With more focus and better results, Nick could justify his salary. Perhaps a well-directed IDPF could even have helped prevent discriminatory VATs on e-books in Europe.
David Moynihan, Mr. Blackmask, also took a poke at OpenReader–for a site that isn’t updated often enough. I totally agree, David. But we’ll have a solution in the near future–along with far more important news–and meanwhile the TeleBlog is one place to look for OpenReader updates. As a standards booster, Interim Exec Director Jon Noring wants the site to be pure XHTML without tables even if that means more fuss and less updating. I’m more of a pragmatist. Our compromise will be easy.openreader.org, a faster-paced site written for publishers and other civilians. We’ll most likely use Mambo, Drupal or another CMS. Suggestions and volunteers welcomed, especially help from CMS folks. Handcrafted sites are so 90ish. Eventually TeleRead.org, too, will enter the 21st century. The real action, of course, has shifted over to the WordPress-driven TeleBlog, reducing the urgency of a full-site makeover
Oh, please. Come on, the open ebook digital forum organization group, by any name, took in less than $150 k last year, with 1/3rd the total coming from a single company (Microsoft), that doesn’t even seem to be involved in ebooks anymore. (At least, not enough to notice there aren’t any more gold members).
Bogarty’s salary represents over 2/3rds of OEBF’s revenue. When a NY-based non-profit spends 60+% of its income on one person, you don’t get results or a solid basis for the future, you get Eliot Spitzer, subpoenas, and your face splashed up on the front cover of the Post. And given what I’ve seen of them, it’s not like they couldn’t replace his efforts with a pair of interns, assuming of course one can find undergraduates in the Manhattan area interested in publishing.
As far as Open Reader, I’m glad there’ve been some additions to the site, but it took over a year for that to happen, and as we all know, once a few kinks in the batching are ironed out, Amazon’s going to be relaunching Mobipocket with over 1 million e-docs available for sale in that format, HTML, and no other.
To give an example from past ebook history: in the early days of retail, Overdrive went like gangbusters, with S&S, Random, Adobe and Barnes & Noble among its prestigious list of clients. Ingram/Lightning Source was far behind.
Cut to now. Ingram/LS, the dominant player in printed book distribution, OWNS most of ebook retail through Amazon, Powell’s and others (selling pdfs, primarily), while Overdrive lacks even a single revenue-generating partner in that space, having lost all its trophies.
No offense and best of luck, but given what you’re up against with Open Reader and the progress made to date, it’s almost as if Overdrive, in their new library initiative, were to announce and schedule launch… sometime vaguely after the day OCLC and Audible lay in with the smackdown.
//Yes, it’s 3:40 AM on Saturday. No, I’m not done scanning…
But Silk Pagoda this week, dammit. Gotta have it before Baltimore.
Hey, David, remember that Nick Bogaty is essentially just an extension of OverDrive boss Steve Potash, the head of the IDFP. For all we know, Nick could be seething inside that he hasn’t been able to do more.
In his own way, I suspect, Nick has earned the $99K in frustration. Steve has his share of good traits, but loves the status quo. He’s built his business around DRM as it exists now. Methinks he’s hurting both himself and e-publishing over the long run. I hope he’ll wise up. If not, even the big boys will want some change. In talents and background, both Steve and Nick are better suited to trade assocociation work. They lack an understanding of standards work. If Nick were to focus instead on promo work and do it in a more credible way than the IDFP does right now, he might get somewhere. He could also attend to such details as lining up monitoring services to follow such grubby details as those discriminatory VATs. I’m not saying he would. But he could.
Whatever the reasons for the wasted $99K, we both fervently agree that the IDPF is not deploying its resources as well as it should be.
Now–about Mobipocket. It’s a laugh for such apps as STM publishing. Unless Amazon completely reinvents the thing, I don’t know how far those people are going to get in the end. And PDF? You’re proud of your ability to do tight files, but in so many cases the bloat goes on. Not good. Beyond that, e-book standards will evolve more gracefully through a consortium strategy.
As for OpenReader, Jon Noring brings to it his background as a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering and favors a more methodical approach than, say, Mobipocket. If you’re an engineer and you build a bridge, you want to do the job right from the start. Otherwise the bridge will collapse, just as e-book standards will if they’re not planned well. Mobipocket under the hood is in this territory. Instead we want good and sturdy XML/CSSish girders.
OK, David. Now get back to work in the here and now, scanning some more old books for us to enjoy. Ideally the day will come soon when you won’t have to worry as much about the Tower of eBabel.
Cheers,
David R