Liza Daly is a software engineer and president of Threepress Consulting Inc., developing applications for publishing and education. Recent work includes online products for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), Oxford University Press, and O’Reilly Media. She is a frequent writer and speaker on publishing technology issues and will be appearing on two panels at the O’Reilly Tools of Change 2009 conference. – K.M.
KM: You are the developer of Bookworm. Can you easily sum up exactly what Bookworm is and what it does for us? (No pressure!)
LD: As a project, Bookworm has two goals:
- Provide a place for users to store ePub-format books, read them online and download them to other devices. iPhone users can transfer their books directly to Stanza’s software for the iPhone, for example.
- Demonstrate advanced features of the ePub format itself. When I launched Bookworm in July 2008, there were no other readers that fully supported e-book stylesheets,
And I wanted to show off some of the design possibilities available in electronic books.
KM: As a developer, you are committed to utilizing OpenSource software. Why?
LD: Although I’ve been involved in digital publishing since 2004, my background is really in general Web development. I’ve been writing Web applications since 1995—about as far back as the industry goes—and the history of the Web as a whole has always been a push-pull between open source and commercial interests.
The real genius of open source licensing is that it explicitly allows for commercial use. In some strict licenses, commercial users are required to themselves redistribute their source code openly, but other licenses place virtually no limitations on use (this is true of Bookworm’s license, for example).
The dirty secret of software development is that is that code, by itself, has very little value. Most of it is easily recreated. There are exceptional cases where brilliant insight and R&D produce code that is truly valuable in and of itself, but that’s rare. For every expensive commercial software product there’s at least one, if not many, open source alternatives. The main difference tends to be better documentation, reliable support, and more polish.
Instead, code is valuable when it serves a specific business need. That almost always means custom work. All of my client work uses open source tools to produce a commercial product, and most of those products have direct revenue streams associated with them, either through subscriptions or through e-commerce.
KM: You’re also an advocate of the ePub e-book standard. Why?
Standards are why everyone uses the Web now instead of AOL. If there’s a common language of information exchange—for example, HTML—then many different players can compete in the same space. Standards level the playing field between big commercial interests and smaller upstarts. This leads directly to more innovation and more consumer choice.
As a developer, standards mean I can jump right in and build something interesting rather than having to begin from scratch. I got started with e-books because I wanted to write some software that could take content in one format and automatically export to multiple other formats. I stumbled on ePub, read the spec, and in just a few days I had working code. The fact that ePub reuses other standards meant that many of the tools I needed to build my specific application already existed. Without ePub as a standard, I might’ve still been wondering how to format a paragraph in the time it took to build a whole e-book platform.
KM: Do the publishers with whom you are working share your concerns about e-book standards? Is it hard to convey to publishers the importance of the issues surrounding e-books and standardized formats?
LD: With larger publishers, by the time they come to me they’re already on board. E-books and digital publishing in general have a lot to offer to smaller publishers too, but they’ve been harder to reach. Frankly, some publishing vendors employ predatory pricing, and that’s set expectations of cost well above the reality. By using open source and open standards, employing very small but talented teams and setting modest goals, small publishers could be innovating online for the cost of a booth at a trade show.
A key advantage that niche publishers have is that obscurity is more dangerous for them than piracy. They’re in the best place possible to meet the increasing reader demand for DRM-free content.
KM: Do you think all books make sense as e-books? Do you think any genres or niches absolutely do, or do not belong in e-book form?
LD: This question has come up a lot lately. Right now, we’re not quite there with art books or books with unique aspect ratios. I believe that e-book readers are going to bifurcate into two form-factors:
- Phone/reader hybrids which will constitute the majority of casual reading/
- Flexible, legal-sized specialty readers—the Kindle 3.0 and beyond.
I don’t see any limit on e-books once the hardware catches up, but that presumes large, color, non-glaring screens. We’re at least 2-3 years away from my ideal specialty reader.
KM: Do the design and aesthetics of the finished “e-book” play a part in the work you do?
Even though I’m a software engineer I am also very interested in design issues. I’ve worked with some really exacting publishers who care deeply about the look and user experience of their digital products, and that’s great. E-books have lagged quite a bit in this area, I think partially because there’s a wall between the consumer and the publisher, and because e-books don’t have the immediate transparency of the web. I’ve complained to Amazon about the formatting in some Kindle books and they’ve refunded my money, but there’s no way to engage in a dialog with the publisher or author about the book’s layout. I know this is something that people are starting to think about, though, and that’s an important step.
KM: On any of your projects, have publishers brought in the printed book designer to work with you on the e-book version(s) of their books? Do you see this sort of collaboration between print and digital designers taking place as e-books catch on with wider audiences?
LD: No, but I would love to do this! For some reason, the real action in digital book design seems to be in the UK—good things have come from Penguin UK and Apt Studios, for example. If anyone wants to fly me to London to work on some great-looking e-books, I’m game.
KM: Do you believe ePub will “win?”
LD: That’s a really good question. I hope so—not because it’s my pet format, but because I believe that would be a win for consumers.
It’s important to remember that a format doesn’t have to be perfect to be right. If someone had asked me to design a universal e-book format I would’ve made some of the same choices as ePub (XHTML for book content, definitely) but others would be quite different (ePub has three metadata files where one would do).
But a perfect format doesn’t matte
r. What matters is that it’s free, has low technical barrier to entry, and everyone can potentially agree to use it. Music consumers were lucky that MP3 arrived before the digital commodification of music and the inevitable DRM lockdown.
E-book fans are going to have to fight a little harder to have control over their legitimately-purchased content.
It saddens me that Amazon appears to be taking an anti-consumerist stance with its continued refusal to support ePub. They’re in a great position to monetize DRM-free content because purchasing with the Kindle is so hassle-free relative to finding pirated copies on the web.
I really hope they come around, but it may take pressure from publishers.
KM: What books are you currently reading—and how are you reading them?
LD: Ha! For obvious reasons, friends and family gave me a lot of print books for Christmas, so I’ve got that stack. Right now I’m a little over halfway through Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives, but I’m taking a break from it and reading a romance novel on my Kindle. Uh, for "research." I’ve got a Sony PRS-505 too, which I use almost exclusively for checking ePubs. In a lot of ways it’s superior to the Kindle, but I believe that any electronic device with no wireless connectivity is ultimately a dead end.
