Reading about e-libraries, I feel as if I’m in Stalinist Russia and every Comrade wants to surpass the quota for pork or tractor production. So much talk of numbers!
I understand. Just a fraction of the world’s books are digitized at this point, and more e-books will mean a greater chance of discovering a quirky 19th century memoirist—or enjoying digital editions of Saul Bellow‘s novels, which, last time I checked, were still not available in electronic format at Fictionwise, Amazon/Mobipocket or eBooks.com, anyway. Still, I mostly agree with a blog post from Andrew Pace, an information technologist at the N.C. State University Libraries and a contributor to major ALA publications:
It’s not a “more digital books” position, but what I like to call “books more digital.” That is, the more digital the book is, the more options publishers, libraries, patrons, and shoppers will have for consuming them and building services upon them. Whether e-ink, cell-phone, or print-on-demand paperback, a more digital book is a more readable book. Now that the “whether or not” debate is coming to an end, it may be time (or it may be too late) for libraries to reinvest their time in investigating standards, pressuring publishers to release content for digitization, and playing with the technology that will soon be (or already is) in the hands of our patrons.
Notice the reference to standards? As I myself see it, a book is much more digital if it can be displayed on many devices, as well as being easy fodder for print on demand. Either inside or outside the International Digital Publishing Forum—I’d vastly prefer inside at this point if the powers-that-be will be more open minded—the e-book industry needs to go far beyond the current standards efforts. I want to see reliable interbook linking, for example, one of the so-far-unrealized promises of e-books (talk about ways for books to be “more digital”!).
OpenReader as a start
With the above hopes in mind, I remain hugely disappointed with the implementation and enforcement of the OpenReader standard. But OpenReader would be a good start for a reinvented IDPF standards initiative, ideally with OpenReader-style standards enjoying support from such new IDPF board members as Peter Brantley and Malle Vallik.
Anti-standards conflicts of interest
Meanwhile I congratulate Andrew for not pulling any punches in discussing the IPDF: “Librarians might remember the IDPF as the OeBF, or Open eBook Forum. It dropped the old moniker when it became clear that the group was essentially a trade organization, and not primarily an effort to create an open e-book standard—a goal that I still believe was thwarted by the conflict of interest of some of its participants in maintaining the strong footing of proprietary technology in the e-books market space.”
If the IDPF doesn’t want to take e-book standards seriously, then I’d love to see librarians join techies and open-minded publishers and address the failings of existing standards. Who should be more interested in interbook linking, for example, than librarians? And their business model is well suited to this. Libraries tend to be more stable than individual publishers and bookstores. While I don’t want to see the library model displace all others, it’s worth building on and actually would help publishers, writers and others—by making links more durable.
The coming show
Now back to IDPF matters. Like me, Andrew is looking forward to learning more about the flash-based Adobe Digital Editions reader, e-paper and other products and technologies that will be discussed at the organization’s Digital Book 2007 in May. There is a time for trade-organization-style activities.
But that shouldn’t displace serious efforts in the standards area. Did you notice Andrew’s “Or is it too late?” reference to standards? In my opinion, it’ll never be too late, but the earlier the e-book industry can truly address these issues, the better.
Related: Brief opinion on the above from Karen Schneider, who agrees with Andrew and says: “Trust me, if you had a device that you liked as much or better as a book, and the price was right, you would forget you ever worshipped dead trees.”
Correction: Yep, that’s Andrew Pace, not Andrew Card. Sorry, Andrew, and thanks for your sense of humor about this. Error fixed. I thought I’d squashed that bug before, but WordPress can be treacherous. The TeleBlog welcomes corrections of bugs of any size.
Thanks, David! Or should I say, Fellow Traveler? One of these days, we’ll get the e-book train back on the right rails.
-Andrew
P.S. I hope it was not some sort of Freudian slip that had you refer to me as ‘Andrew Card’. I would not want anyone confusing me with a former member of the Bush Administration.