0

By

If you want your computer to read aloud to you, a forthcoming spec from an Open eBook Forum working group may help you in the future–by making it easier to move around in the e-book you’re listening to.

The spec, scheduled to appear sometime in 2004, will also allow your e-book to link precisely to material in another e-book.

“First of all, we are currently planning to greatly improve the representation of the navigational structure of e-book documents,” Jon Noring, acting vice chair of the OeBF’s Publication Structure Working Group, tells me about the navigational capabilities of Version 2.0.

“Better navigational structure will benefit both visual readers and those listening via text-to-speech,” he says.

“An OEBPS Reading System which fully employs the advanced navigational features we currently envision will allow the end-user to navigate through the e-book in very advanced ways that are difficult to do in the paper realm. It will be much more than just a stodgy, linear table of contents.”

Much of the improved navigational capability will likely be inspired by the ‘Navigation Control’ component of the Digital Talking Book (DTBook) standard, developed by the accessibility community.

“I can even foresee that speech-recognition will be built into some OEBPS Reading Systems and the voice commands of the reader will interface with the navigational structure of the e-book to allow the reader, by voice, the ability to move anywhere in the e-book,” Jon says.

“This will happen in very powerful and intelligent ways, at least for those Publications where the publisher fully takes advantage of the new navigational features.”

In addition, the new spec is planned to make it easier to link precisely from one e-book to another e-book. This could help pave the way for works of nonfiction to link to specific paragraphs within each other–making e-books a more serious medium.

Plus, Version 2.0 may improve upon fallbacks, so OEBPS Publications will more easily “scale-down” to older, less powerful reading devices. So even in the future an OEBPS 2.0 Publication will have an even wider range of viewability on present-day and future devices.

“The improved fallback mechanisms will make OEBPS even friendlier in incorporating advanced markup such as MathML and SVG,” Jon says, “which I personally believe is necessary for OEBPS to become truly universal in digitally representing books.”

Besides better navigation, inter-publication linking capability, and improved fallback mechanisms, an important final goal of PS 2.0 development is to put the spec on firmer ground so forward and backward compatibility is achieved for future versions of the specification–both on the publication and reading-system sides.

“That means architecturing the specification to allow this,” Jon says. “In reality, we probably will not achieve complete and perfect two-way compatibility between future spec versions and associated Reading Systems–probably no one can. But we’ll do our best to get most of the way there.”

Currently publishers are using the spec only as an exchange standard for moving text back and forth between different formats, as opposed to being an actual distribution format standard at the consumer level.

The hope of many e-book boosters is that the OeBF Publication Structure will become an official distribution standard and will then allow files to be displayed on all machines, ranging from desktops to PDAs and dedicated e-book readers–just as CDs and video tapes use standard formats with ability to work on a large range of playback devices.

Noting the usual caveat in standards work, Jon says: “Of course, the final version of OEBPS 2.0 may end up being different than currently envisioned. So the new planned features may not appear or may be substantially different, and there could also be other changes and additions. But what I’ve discussed is a glimpse into our current development ‘road map.’”

For the full annual report of the Publication Structure Working Group, as well as other reports from working groups, visit the presentations section of the OeBF site.

 
0