Publishing Perspectives

To English-speaking e-book fans, of course, fragmentation is nothing new; there has not been a single cohesive format for e-books since they first gained popularity back in the 1990s. In France, a similar situation has arisen: each publisher is releasing books on its own distribution platform.

A report commissioned by France’s Culture Minister proposes that a single platform be created for the distribution of e-books. However, French publishers reacted to this about as well as you might expect Apple, Amazon, and Google would respond to the notion that they should post all their books together on “iAmaGoo”.

The publishers suggest, instead, a “hub” whereby retailers would be able to sell e-books from any given platform via one access point. Because French publishers consider control of their file systems to be very important, this may be as close as France’s government is going to get.

I find it interesting how much some things are universal. We have a confusing “Tower of E-Babel” problem over here, especially with regard to the third-party e-book readers whose manufacturers do not run their own e-book stores. But it appears France has its own “Eiffel Tower of E-Babel,” though in that case it seems to cause more trouble for retailers than for consumers.

And both countries seem to have about the same likelihood of resolving it any time soon.

Related:

• France: Hachette Livre wants publishers to join their digital platform; Google and Amazon must agree to publishers’ pricing
• French book retailers seek help to create ‘national e-book platform’

Gizmodo

The article starts with a Steve Jobs quote about Apple using the EPUB format because of its “openness,” and proceeds to fill in what he is not saying: “open” or not, DRM-locked iBooks books will not be readable on other DRM’d EPUB capable readers, nor vice versa.

And don’t expect that DRM to be going away any time soon:

You may be thinking that it’s just a matter of time before ebook stores all go DRM free. That would be wishful thinking at best. While ebooks might seem a lot like digital music circa 2005, you can’t rip a book, so the only way to get a bestseller on your reader is to buy it legally, or to steal it. It’s pretty much that simple. There will be free books, there will be unencrypted books, and the torrents will rage with bestsellers (as they already do). Still, DRM’s gonna be a hard fact of life with every major bookstore, since they’re going to at leasttry to keep you from stealing it. You don’t see Hollywood giving up DRM, do you?

It also explains why every device except the Kindle reads EPUB, and the way the Kindle’s Mobipocket-based formats and Barnes & Noble’s eReader-based format hark back to PDA legacy formats.

I found it particularly interesting that the article complained about the chance of getting an eReader-format book when you want an EPUB-format one, given that we carried a story about someone in exactly the opposite situation.

The article concludes with the suggestion that creating custom apps to contain books might be the way to go. (I’m not entirely sure whether it’s talking about appbooks, or just individual apps from specific publishers.)

One amusing note: at the end, the article suggests that scanned-comic piracy will “explode” when the iPad comes out, now that a good screen will exist for reading those colored pages.

I suspect that Buchanan probably has not checked out the Internet comic piracy scene lately, given that it is possible to find just about any comic you want on BitTorrent already. But just wait—as soon as the iPad comes out, I’ll bet you that even though the amount of it does not change much, everybody will be Macaulay Culkin-faceslapping in horror how much of a Problem it suddenly is.

I don’t agree with everything the article has to say, but it makes a good primer on the “Tower of E-Babel” problem. Worth a look.

1. strengthen fair use, including reforming outrageously high statutory damages, which deter innovation and creativity;
2. reform the DMCA to permit circumvention of digital locks for lawful purposes;
3. update the limitations and exceptions to copyright protection to better conform with how digital technologies work;
4. provide recourse for people and companies who are recklessly accused of copyright infringement and who are recklessly sent improper DMCA take-down notices; and
5. streamline arcane music licensing laws to encourage new and better business models for selling music.

Point 2 should be of particular interest to e-book fans who would like to be able to read the books they purchase on any device they own, and could go a good way toward solving the “Tower of e-Babel” problem of incompatible formats and devices.

Of course, it is doubtful this proposal will actually end up going anywhere. We have covered attempts at similar legislation in the past (such as these in 2002 and 2003) but they petered out in the end—and they had actual Congressional sponsorship.

Nonetheless, it is good that the issue is at least getting more attention.

The positives of Ezra Klein‘s CJR article and related video: He’s a new Kindle user and hails the machine as “credible. As a product of Amazon, it’s intertwined with the world’s largest online bookstore, legitimized by the one company that can lay some claim to having already changed the way we use, or at least acquire, books. The real question, though, is what took so long?”

In general, the Klein article is upbeat on E and notes the possibilities of  adjustable font sizes, outbound links, interactivity and updated books (albeit, I’d assume, not the 1984ish variety). At the same time his CJR piece correctly recognizes that the Kindle and the like are not perfect replacements for paper books, given the screen-contrast problems of E Ink, among the other flaws.

The negatives—blindness to the eBabel and DRM issues: Um, Ezra, I mostly liked your piece, but as an e-book newbie, you unwittingly left out a few details. Unless we want the whole bleepin’ e-book world to revolve around Jeff Bezos, we deserve nonproprietary e-book standards in areas ranging from the basic format to guidelines for shared annotations and interbook linking.

An improved ePub, not the Kindle format, is what the e-book world need to avoid a classic Standard Oil scenario. Check out O’Reilly Media exec Andrew Savikas’s warnings about the various kinds of lock-ins that Amazon is trying out in E and P. Also see Tim O’Reilly: ‘Publishers beware: Amazon has you in their sights.’ 

While you’re at it, Ezra, you may want to address the DRM issue, too, which really ties in with the Tower of eBabel issue. Just why is Jeff so gungho about DRMless music but–via the Kindle and Mobipocket stores—continuing to inflict his proprietary DRM even on publishers who don’t want it? Meanwhile, for some insight on the risk of Amazon as a business partner, read up on the Toys ‘R’ Us suit. As an e-book booster I want the Kindle to success, and if Jeff can make his shareholders richer, then great. But let’s not glaze over the issue of who will control American publishing, or, as far as DRM, whether people in the future will be able to own their books for real. Hey, Ezra, the best of luck in delving further into E, Amazon and related matters!

An aside: Maybe CJR can solve the mystery of why PW ripped out the E-Book Report archives, at least in terms of public access—along with those of the former publisher and the woman who hired me to do EBR. All of the tens of thousands of words I wrote for PW are gone. The massive link kills are not exactly the best way to maintain PW’s credibility on the Web, especially when EBR and other blogs appeared with “Link this” invitations. Any connections with my comments about Amazon or DRM, or my other uppity writings? Or just corporate politics? Or a mix? And exactly who ordered the link kills? Editor Sara Nelson (who’s taught at Columbia and, I’d hope, wasn’t responsible) or someone on the business side of PW or the parent company Reed Business Information?

Related: Rekindling our love of the written word, in the Herald Sun, from Down Under.

David Rothman recently called on IDPF to develop an open standard, third-party annotation and linking format. I’ve previously written about the need for such a standard in two TeleRead articles [1, 2]. Hopefully the third time will be a charm!

The need for such a standard is pretty obvious. Various companies are already implementing their own proprietary standards for third-party annotation of, and linking between, digital media such as books, music, video, etc. Annotation and linking of content (no matter the type of content) is rapidly becoming a vital and fundamental component of interactivity with content, being of great value to business, academia, education, libraries and archives, social networking, etc.

Thus it is important for interoperability (that is, to prevent another Tower of eBabel) to have a single, well-designed, open standard format for third-party annotation and linking. From my research in this area, I have not yet found a developed standard suitable for this purpose (but if one exists, let me know, please!)

“Real-World” example: Annotating an e-book

Because the above introduction is a tad theoretical, let me give a fun “real-world” example to better illustrate what I’m discussing:

Mary is sitting on the beach reading a steamy romance novel on her e-book reading device (e.g., laptop computer, or dedicated e-book reader.) In a particular scene of the story, she is introduced to a character named “Charles,” about whom she really would like to share her thoughts with others. For example, she might want to share something relatively academic like “Charles reminds me of a character right out of a 19th century English novel,” or maybe something a little more earthy and personal like “Wow, Charles is a real hunk!” (I’m not sure if “Charles” can be both!)

Mary’s reading system fortunately includes the capability to create an annotation object in the standard format. So Mary highlights the portion of text she wants to annotate, and composes her note in an editing window. When she’s finished, she pushes the “Done” button. The reading system then creates a file (in fancier jargon, a “digital object”) which contains her note, plus whatever pointers, identifiers, and metadata are needed, all encoded in the standard annotation format. Mary did not have to learn anything complicated to compose the note—the reading system took care of all the “under the hood” stuff.

(Importantly note that the e-book itself is not changed in any way.)

Mary can now share her digital annotation object with others, such as uploading it to a repository designed for the purpose of sharing annotations, emailing it directly to one of her friends, offering it from her web site, or some other means. Others who read the same e-book title may then download and read her note applied to the same spot in the e-book where Mary applied it, provided of course their reading systems, which need not be the same that Mary uses, support the same annotation standard.

(I’d like to note that OSoft’s innovative dotReader annotates texts pretty much as described above, along with other kinds of powerful interactivity. Of course, OSoft is currently using an “in-house” format for their annotations since there is not yet an industry standard.)

Shall we call it PAL?

Marketing is everything, so a catchy name to describe the system and files is probably a good idea. So I tentatively propose calling this annotation/linking standard “PAL”, short for “portable annotation/linking”. The digital object produced in a PAL system could be called “PALO” where the “O” is for “object”. A PALO might even have a file type suffix of “.pal”.

I’m not wedded to PAL as the name, but unless someone comes up with something catchier, I do kind of like PAL. At least I have a name to call this system for the remainder of this article. (Hmmm, there is a long-time PAL standard for color encoding in television broadcasting. Room for another PAL spec?)

What about linking in PAL?

Up to this point I’ve mostly talked about annotation, but very little on linking. So why have one standard for both? As you will see, they are really variations on the same thing.

First I have to define linking. What I mean by “linking” is essentially “connecting” two or more “spots” together. A spot could either be an entire object (e.g., an e-book), or some particular portion “inside” of an object (e.g., a particular sentence in an e-book.) Furthermore, the spots could either be in the same object (e.g., in the same e-book), or in different objects (e.g., an e-book and a video), or a combination of both. (All combinations of any number and type of objects, and spots within objects, are possible.)

For example, I have two different e-books (two different titles.) I would like to connect a spot or location in one to a spot in the other. So with a tool (hopefully in the reading system), I create a PALO which provides pointers to the two spots, describes the nature of the connection between them, and could optionally include an annotation describing, for human consumption, more details on the connection.

PAL may be useful for things other than just e-books

Since TeleRead primarily focuses on digital publications such as e-books, I’ve given mostly e-book examples. But as we think about it, the PAL standard will work for all kinds of target resources, both digital and, interestingly, non-digital. (A PALO could even reference another PALO!) The potential of universality, of “annotating everything,” is the focus of one of the two prior articles I wrote on this idea.

PAL thus seems to be quite powerful in a variety of ways which I think are obvious to anyone who begins thinking about its many potential uses. As I have noted in private to a few others about PAL (you know who you are!), I believe PAL is potentially a billion dollar business. What I really mean by this statement is that PAL could play a significant role in a number of major commercial products and services: in publishing, and in many other industries completely outside of the digital content arena.

Of personal interest, one of the more intriguing opportunities is a public PALO repository to allow universal storing, sharing and finding of PALOs (imagine it holding trillions of PALOs which essentialy annotate all of human activity, and not just digital content.)

Thoughts on the PAL framework

It is premature to even propose the details of the PAL general framework since we need to put together a comprehensive set of general requirements from a representative cross-section of industries that would apply the general framework for their particular needs.

Stating this in a less formal way, I think that the PAL specification should be general in form—thus my use of the word “framework” to describe it. Particular industries, such as the e-book industry, would specify how exactly the PAL framework would be used for its purposes. For example, IDPF may specify how PAL should point to spots or locations within EPub e-books, along with other specifics.

Nevertheless, I will suggest a number of technologies that are likely to be leveraged in developing the PAL framework. Those that come to mind include W3C specs such as XML, RDF, OWL etc. An interesting alternative to RDF is the Uniform Resource Framework (URF). And of course, many here will notice a distant relationship between PAL and RSS and its relatives (RSS is an application of RDF.) Certainly PAL intersects the worlds of the Semantic Web and Web 2.0. PAL appears to be a powerful way by which the world’s digital and non-digital information may be interconnected by third-parties, both human and machine. (In addition, this standard might also be used in an indexing capacity, since an index is simply a topically-organized list of pointers.)

What’s the next step?

David is suggesting that IDPF start and/or lead the effort to create PAL. I support this provided that IDPF does not restrict the effort solely to EPub without consideration of its broader use. Any effort should bring together a critical mass of representative standards bodies, organizations and companies to assure that the PAL framework is properly designed for broadbase application.

What use is an “in-house” format that may become incompatible to a generalized version later developed for, and embraced by, a number of industries? There is a time to go-it-alone, and a time to work with others. I believe PAL falls squarely into the latter category because of its potential universal use. Even if PAL ends up being restricted to digital content, the world of digital content is a whole lot bigger than just e-books: we have other types of text content including web pages, and of course audio, video, and other multimedia.

One purpose of this article is to introduce PAL to the IDPF Board and interested IDPF member organizations, so they may decide whether IDPF should be involved in developing the PAL framework and its specific application to EPub.

I offer to organize and/or lead any IDPF chartered special interest group to study the feasibility of PAL, to form the necessary alliances, assemble the needed “brain power,” maybe generate a preliminary list of general requirements, and put together a plan of action for the actual authoring and publication of the PAL specification.

Interested?

Anyone reading this who is interested in being involved in the authoring of the PAL specification, let me know!