Noises from the Open eBook Forum haven’t always been easy to decode over the years. Microsoft launched the OeBF with unequivocal promises of a consumer-level e-book format. The present OeB can’t make up its mind and has been dilly-dallying despite excellent format work at the production level. Under the presidency of Steve Potash, CEO of OverDrive, which wants to make big bucks off the Tower of eBabel, the OeBF even comes across at times as the Proprietary Format Promoters’ Forum. And yet the group doggedly goes ahead at the production level.
Now, alas for the Potashes, a pesky question is arising. What if open-source people successfully took the OeBF-developed production format and ran with an adaptation at the consumer level? OeBF, meet LiberGNU and friends in Italy. LiberGNU has just announced an alliance with EvolutionBook toward the success of the OpenBERG project, aided by the aptly named Project GNUtemberg, as well as Liber Liber. Not sure if I have all the players down right. But here is the word from LiberGNU:
Last 24th of June took place an informal meeting, where Maurizio Patitucci, Andrea Colanicchia (EvolutionBook), Marco Calvo, Stefania Ronci and Ruggero Montalto (LiberLiber) agreed on the priority of having a free (as in freedom) OEB reader ready for use, as soon as possible, in order to show to both e-bookstores and libraries the advantages of the OEB format (as described by Jon Noring in his recent article).
Can LiberGNU and friends topple the Tower of eBabel? Who knows. In the U.S., many obstacles remain, such as the love of some large U.S. publishers for oppressive Digital Rights Management schemes–the anthesis of what OpenBERG is all about. Perhaps the Italian alliance is just thinking “demo” at this point when it comes to the commercial side (although one can see the immediate usefulness for readers of unshackled material like the Free Encyclopedia Project). But that could change. What is clear is that the world won’t sit still while the OeBF proscrastinates.
