OpenReader Consortium vs. Tower of eBabel

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The OpenReader Consortium was announced yesterday as an alternative to the Tower of eBabel.

Going beyond e-books alone to include media such as magazines and newspapers, this digital-publications reading system will be cross platform and open source.

OpenReader’s Universal Consumer Format will be a welcome contrast to “VHS-vs.-Beta times ten” and could spell massive relief for consumers, said Jon Noring, the veteran e-book format expert who has been coordinating the early planning.

Quality typography

Significantly, Michael Day of YesLogic, one of the world’s leading CSS experts, dedicated to precise rendering of text, is among those involved with the OpenReader project.

In other words, OpenReader will emphasize not just consumer convenience but also high-quality typography so important to leading publishers as well as image-minded corporations in other areas of business. Present e-book products tend to fall rather short of print standards.

Building on the OeBF’s own standards

“This is intended to become the reading format standard of the future,” says Noring, an invited expert for the Open eBook Forum as well as the moderator of the eBook Community list. OpenReader is not part of the OeBF but will build on the OeBF’s production-level standards.

The resultant consumer format is to follow the principles outlined in a Noring article last year on the eBookWeb site–calling for the Universal Consumer Format.

An invitation to join the OpenReader Consortium

A statement on OpenReader is on the OpenReader home page. This project is now in the preliminary assessment and design stage, which is mostly finished. Individuals and companies interested in seeing what the OpenReader Consortium is all about, and possibly joining the effort, should contact Jon Noring directly at jon@noring.name. In addition, OpenReader should be of interest to schools, libraries, government agencies and advocates of people with disabilties. With XML-related technology, OpenReader will work especially well with speech synthesis and otherwise promote accessibility.

This is a good cause. In line with my frequent criticism of the Tower of eBabel, I’m participating. The Open eBook Forum has made it clear it does not want to do a Universal Consumer Format despite all the promises made at a 1998 e-book conference. At the same time some of the proprietary formatters have challenged me to do something constructive for the industry rather than just writing of the shortcomings of the present approach. Pleased to oblige.

Could spur hardware and e-book sales and save many millions

Consider all the millions that the format wars have cost in sales of e-books and related hardware–not to mention the burden on schools and libraries, which would rather not cope with “VHS vs. Beta times ten.” The Tower of eBabel is one reason why global e-book sales are a pathetic $20-$30 million a year, or less than the typical annual income of Tom Clancy. “There was a format war,” Reuters has quoted David Steinberger, HarperCollins president of corporate strategy and international. “They compete and are not compatible. That creates resistance.”

Beyond that, imagine all direct savings that an open format could offer publishers and retailers alike. The idea won’t be to end all the proprietary formats immediately but let the marketplace decide. If history repeats itself, open standards will prevail–just as the Internet has dwarfed the likes of CompuServe.

While Jon is hardly the biggest advocate of Digital Rights Management, the OpenReader Consortium will address such issues by encouraging the development of a nonproprietary DRM Lite, as we call it. The goal won’t be an uncrackable system, but rather to create a sensible balance between intellectual property protection and convenience of consumers. Present forms of DRM are actually harming the e-book industry by making e-books cumbersome to use. Many publishers, including Jon’s Blue Glass Publishing, find they fare much better without DRM. Just the same, a nonproprietary DRM option will be available for publishers who want protection.

If we didn’t do OpenReader

Even without our going ahead with OpenReader, e-bookdom would eventually get standardization. Trouble is, it probably would be standardization built around the products of one giant company–Microsoft or Adobe. By contrast, OpenReader offers an opportunity for the evolution of a publication format to be influenced by many organizations in the private and public sectors, without the countless legal and archival complications that could arise in the future with just one company in control.

Without a consortium approach and a UCF, a single corporation would be able to change a format on a whim. With a jointly created UCF, however, the evolution should be far, far more predictable so that software companies can confidently develop and market different readers, competing on such features as ease of use. Just why should they squander so many R&D dollars on development of clashing formats, when a consortium approach would cost individual corporations and independent programmers less and lead to better results?

Moreover, with sophisticated standards in place, higher typographical standards should be easier to attain–a benefit to publishers of all kinds, not just book publishers.

Beyond publishing, the possibility exists that an OpenReader format could become an alternative to the Adobe-controlled Portable Document Format in business and industry. An “open” version of PDF offers fewer features than the proprietary flavor and is an excellent illustration of the need for the main format to be open from the start.

Related: A recording of Jon’s interview yesterday on eBookworm. Also: Feds help create PDF archiving standard, from Government Computer News, via LISNews.