Exploiting The E-Book

1
Exploiting The E-Book
Abstract This talk will describe the portable
e-Book reader by placing it in a historical
context, describe the dangers of the current
confusion in terminology and the importance of
standards and strategic thinking.

• Brian Kelly
• UK Web Focus
• UKOLN
• University of Bath

Email B.Kelly_at_ukoln.ac.uk URL http//www.ukoln.ac.
uk/
UKOLN is supported by
2
Contents

• Introduction
• Historical Perspective
• The E-Book What Is It?
• Publishing For The E-Book
• Beyond The E-Book ? The Talking Book
• Conclusions

3
About Me

• Brian Kelly
• UK Web Focus a JISC-funded post to advise UK
  Higher and Further Education communities on Web
  developments
• Based in UKOLN a national focus for digital
  information management located at the University
  of Bath
• Provides advice to UK HE / FE communities on best
  practices for providing Web services (but no
  direct involvement with people with disabilities)
• Recent involvement in looking at the potential
  for e-books within HE / FE (with links with
  Library sector)
• First used a mainframe computer in 1974

4
Devices

• A history of mainstream computer devices

Old Paper tape Punch card Terminal VDUs Graphics
terminal Micro (e.g. BBC, Commodore, Sinclair)
Current PC Macintosh Unix / Linux workstations
and servers
Emerging E-Book WAP, GPRS, 3G Digital
TV PDAs Kiosks Laptop (for students) Networking
technologies Wireless LANs / Bluetooth
Failures? X Terminals NCs (Network
Computers) Thin Clients
Futures Watches Wearables Electronic ink
(eink.com)
5
Lessons

• Marketplace
• Need to be aware of marketplace developments
• PC as winner / NC as failure / Mac as niche
  market
• New products and apps are appearing rapidly and
  are disappearing too! (dot.com collapses)
• Avoidance of proprietary lock-in
• Avoid being locked into a device (cf. BBC Micro
  CBL applications dongles for PC software etc.)
• Free readers arent enough (cf. browser plugins)
• Royalty-free licences arent enough (cf. GIF)
• Standards
• Support for standards essential to
• Minimise locking dangers
• Allow resources to be reused

6
Current Position

• Weve been here before. What is different today?
• Information hungry society (multiple TV channels,
  email lists, SMS messages, voice mail, )
• Pervasive networking coming in UK (e.g. free
  network access from PCs in shopping malls in Hong
  Kong)
• Demand from a computer literate student intake
  (Nintendo generation)
• Demand for universal access for all

Where can I read my email? - typical question
for the academic at a conference. The answer is
now not just the conferences PC facilitys but
laptop / PDA mobile phone / landline / wireless
LAN
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Benefits

• Devices Purchased By Users
• Pass on capital and supports costs to students!
• Laptop policy for students attempted at Warwick -
  but students are buying mobile phones and PDAs
  anyway
• Mobile Access
• Providing access from home / from anywhere will
• Minimise transport costs, ease congestion, etc.
• Minimise demand on institutional facilities
• Offline reading should be a good thing, and its
  desirable to facilitate this
• Universal Accessibility
• Access to resources for people with a range of
  disabilities

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What is An E-Book (1)

• Which of the following gives the closest
  approximation to your view of the term E-Book
• Access to book-like resources from a computer
• Managed access to book-like resources, providing
  Library-type facilities, such as reservation,
  loans, MARC records, etc.
• A hand-held device (as described 20 years ago in
  HitchHikers Guide To The Galaxy)
• A talking book
• Something else
• All of the above

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What Is An E-Book (2)

• An e-book can be
• A trendy name for any resource on the Web
• A resource (often large and book-like) to which
  access is managed (and resource often
  encrypted)
• A format which describes book-like structures
  andcorresponding functions
• A resource designed for reading on small devices
• Name of device used to read files in e-book
  format

This talk focuses on the small device (and
corresponding formats)
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Mobile Devices

• A range of different types of mobile devices are
  available

E-BookReader
PDA
Hybrid
Mobile Phone
Palms PDAs are availablefrom 100-400
eBookman hybrid e-book reader, MP3 player and
PDA (was at Argos for 169)
Traditional E-Book reader such as Rocket cost
about 249
Siemenshybrid phone, MP3 player and PDA
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Some Personal Comments

• Dedicated E-Book Reader
• Heavy (large hardback) but good for sustained
  reading
• PDA
• Usable for multiple purposes (calendaring,
  note-taking, email, Web browsing,, )
• Hybrid
• PDA plus MP3 music player looks attractive to
  youth market
• Mobile Phone
• Communications, not content, is king as weve
  seen from popularity of mobiles and SMS.

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Exploiting The New Devices

• The Researcher
• Plugs mobile device into desktop machine and
  downloads W3C Web site for reading over weekend
• Uses intelligent agent to find relevant resources
  from e-print archives and downloads to mobile
  device for reading on (long) train journey
• The Student
• On Friday evening in student bar, a friend
  mentions some useful reading resources. She
  takes out her mobile device and, using the
  Student Unions wireless network, she downloads
  the resources
• The Social Animal
• I plan my TV and radio viewing and visits to
  cinema using personalised AvantGo settings

13
An Unsolicited Quote

• I'm a real fan of eBooks - particularly because
  they are easier to hold than a book!  I have a
  spinal injury and I have read more books in the
  last 6 months that the previous 6 years
• Unsolicited email message received by a colleague
  following a presentation she gave on e-Books

14
Managing The New Devices

• Procurement and Management of the Devices
• IT services responsible for hardware procurement
  and manage PC clusters, but who will lend out the
  devices?
• Do IT services negotiate preferred deals and
  leave users to buy?
• Procurement And Management Of The Content
• Clearly a task for the library?
• Publishing Your Own Content
• Lets not forget this
• Who defines strategy for publishing?
• cf. the Web initial interest in finding
  content, now in publishing

15
E-Book Format Wars

• PDF Derivative
• Based on Adobes PDF format
• Well-established, well-used
• Proprietary, and based on appearance rather than
  structure
• XML Derivative
• Based on XML
• XML is now well-established
• Open standards, and, being based based on
  document structure, supports re-purposing
• My Proprietary Format
• Other companies muscling in, and making an
  attractive offer to convert your documents to
  their locked format

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Proprietary Formats

• Warnings
• Dangers of proprietary formats
• Difficulties in reuse of resources
• Difficulties in managing browser plugins

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Peace In Our Time?

• There has been
• Recognition of the dangers of format wars
• Agreement between the two main camps
• Adoption of XML -)
• See OeB (Open eBook Forum) Web site

lthttp//www.openebook.org/gt
Note also AAP standards work in rights
management, metadata and numbering see
lthttp//www.publishers.org/home/ebookstudy.htmgt
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Unresolved Issues

• Standards issues still be resolved include
• Digital Rights Management (DRM) The book
  publishing world is aware of the difficulties
  that music publishers found themselves in with
  applications such as NapsterEBX is a proposed
  DRM standard
• Cataloguing InformationONIX (ONline Information
  eXchange) is a proposed standard for sharing
  catalogue information between publishers and
  libraries

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Creating An E-Book
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Viewing

• Here is what the the resource looks like using
  their viewing software

E-ditorial This file was created using the
E-ditorial software. What is an e-book?A
simple explanation would be to say that an e-book
is a self-running computer program - an
executable file. i.e. this is a proprietary
format!
See lthttp//www.e-ditorial.com/gt.
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Another Creation Tool
Drag and drop a Web resource
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A Better Way

• Is this ease of creation desirable
• Its easy to create a HTML page
• Its easy to update Web pages to HTML 4/XHTML
• Its easy to create a PDF version
• Its easy to create a WAP site
• Its easy to make use of Flash
• Is this true?

If you have a large Web site to maintain and wish
to support multiple devices (some which may not
take off) you will have to use an automated
approach to content management
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Resource Reuse

• You should store your resources in a neutral,
  richly-structured format (ideally XML)

B2B formats
Specialist formats
XML Database
Local script /CMS /XSLT transformation
XHTML
WML
Can you think of any valid reasons for storing
resources in a proprietary format, with limited
scope for reuse?
E-book format

• Are
• To provide encryption security
• To outsource the digitisation
• To get fancy bells and whistles
• good enough reasons?

PDF
Print
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Beyond The E-Book

• PDAs are becoming more advanced e.g. consider
  the Franklin E-bookman
• Advertisement
• Listen to a song, Schedule a Meeting, Listen to
  a Book, Take a Note
• It provides audio facilities
• Subscription options (13 / month in US) for
  Audible books (see lthttp//www.audible.com/gt)
• over 12,000 audiobooks from that ranges from
  bestsellers to radio programs to The Wall Street
  Journal
• Cost 150 (at Amazon.com)
• See lthttp//www.franklin.com/eBookMan/gt

Note before buying one read the reviews!
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E-Books and Talking Books

• We are seeing convergence with other devices. For
  example consider the Rio consumer device
• The Rio 800 comes with 64 MB of memory, enough
  for about an hour of MP3 music. It can also
  accommodate Windows Media Audio (WMA) files,
  which can stretch the playing time out to
  nearly two hours ... It plays Audible formats 2,
  3, and 4 and it holds up to 20.5 hours of
  programming.
• Cost 225 (at Amazon.com)
• Subscription options for Audible books (via
  Amazon.com but not Amazon.co.uk)

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Digital Talking Books

• New Talking Book devices
• Digital devices aimed at visually impaired
• Use an XML DTD
• Standards work coordinated by the Daisy
  Consortium
• See lthttp//www.daisy.org/gt
• The proposed national standard for the Digital
  Talking Book (Z39.86-200x) is out for ballot
  see lthttp//www.niso.org/gt

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and Voice Browsers

• Another mobile device is the Voice Browser
• Use your mobile phone to interact with
  voice-enabled Web services
• Work being coordinated by W3C (see
  lthttp//www.w3.org/Voice/gt)
• Current status of work uncertain due to concerns
  over patent claims ?

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Putting It All Together

• W3Cs SMIL
• Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language
• W3Cs open standard for integrating streaming
  audio and video with images, text, etc.
• Potential accessibility benefits
• See lthttp//www.w3.org/AudioVideo/gt

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An Example
LpPlayer from lthttp//www.labyrinten.se/english/l
pplayer.htmlgt

• An example of a digital talking book application
  can be seen by installing an application such as
  LpPlayer.
• Although this runs on a PC, Microsoft (for
  example) have stated their PocketPC device will
  support the standard.

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Conclusions

• To conclude
• There are many new consumer devices arriving
  which appear to have potential for general use
• Will also have benefits for people with
  disabilities
• Inevitably some devices and formats will fail to
  gain acceptance (remember BetaMax!)
• Avoid proprietary lock-in
• Dangerous if you choose a failure (Betamax)
• Dangerous if you choose a winner (Microsoft)
• Management of access to e-books is important
• Creation of e-book resources also important
• There will be new devices which makes standards
  and interoperability even more important