Standardization of ebooks is in the publishing industry’s hands. If they can’t manage it, and if they can’t streamline their workflow so production of an accurate, simple ebook doesn’t come almost automatically, some of them deserve to go out of business. I’m beginning to suspect publishing is overproducing, leading to low margins and poor quality. That way lies madness.

Regards,
Jack Tingle

The second problem is that huge amounts of eBook code, especially in the ePub format, is used by the creation application to circumvent the automatic controls built into the specification and the devices. The most common that I’ve seen is the use of the “p” tag and a “class” to define every element. We want our eBooks to be read and appreciated by live human beings, but we have to realize that in the world of eBooks a machine has to read them first. If we circumvent the codes the machine uses to display content, then it can’t render it properly.

The third area is the fundamental understanding of design and the designer’s responsibility when it comes to eBooks. It is a new era. We can no longer design books knowing the exact size of the finished work. It might be less than 2″ wide, or it might be viewed on a 20″ desktop. The reader might be inches away from the content or feet away. There is no way possible for designers to create a “hard” design for every possible set of viewing circumstances. It was so easy when we knew the book would be a 6×9 trade paper. Now it could be any size. This requires a whole new understanding of design in a world that holds anything static as anathema. Designers aren’t being prepared to design for this world.

There is a shared responsibility for the look of eBooks on the part of device/software makers, designers, and publishers. It may seem impossible, but we made it through the conversion from hot lead to cold type to desktop publishing and good design survived. It will survive this one as well.

UK publishers are probably nearer to Australians than Americans in that respect. I’m under the impression that a lot of the movement in ebooks (all over) is due to champions here and there in the business (often in the sf/f imprints) pushing for it. The smaller the business, the fewer of those people there are.

Books hold about the same value as movies and music to me, which means they are very valuable, but not worth much more than 5 or 6 bucks a piece. Maybe a college textbook would be more…how ’bout 10-15 bucks? Anything more starts to tilt the scales in favor of 1) piracy or 2) doing without. I do pay to go to the movie theater, but haven’t paid more than $5 for the experience for quite a while. The only reason I’m willing to do so is that the experience cannot be duplicated. If I had the means to build a personal theater, I wouldn’t go to the movies.

Economies of scale and usefulness is what its all about. Do I believe the various kinds of authors should get paid for their work? Yes. But, I think certain members of each artistic community (if we can call them that) get paid way too much already, including some of the content creators themselves. Creators/publishers/etc. should be trying to sell more copies for less worldwide…end of story. If they did, I’d probably buy textbooks on all sorts of subjects for myself even if I’m not taking a class, and I think there’s enough people like me out there that the publishers would make up lost sales, and in many cases, gain from this strategy.

Teleread says — Blio is a software platform … that is platform neutral. –

The news announcement says — Blio is also hardware neutral, meaning it works on a number of devices, including personal computers, laptops, netbooks and iPhones, not to mention up and coming tablets. –

I would urge to be cautious with the term “platform neutral”, which can easily be mistaken for “cross-platform”. Baring in mind that at this stage this is just speculation based on vague details from press releases, I don’t think that the growing community of Mac users will benefit from the “sexy” features Blio seem to offer.

You see, the current version of the Blio Reader (as demonstrated by its creators) is written in .NET / WPF ; just like the KNFB Reader PC [1] ; which is a Microsoft Windows-only technology (desktop, not mobile). The iPhone “companion” software looks like a diminutive spin-off, and it looks like it’s nothing ground-breaking (there are good mobile ePub / e-Book readers out there, available right-now).

Let’s face it: the buzz surrounding the Blio venture is essentially due to (1) the promised integrated video and interaction features ; which is possibly innovative, if content providers actually follow suit (see the existing Vook offering) ; and (2) to the cool user-interface / 3D animations / smooth transitions (nothing new, but which will appeal to an audience nonetheless).

The word-by-word TTS rendering is nice, however this doesn’t guarantee that the content will be accessible to blind users. Visually-impaired users may feel at home, but blind users have much more sophisticated functional requirements.
There was actually a mention of synchronized human narration (i.e. recorded audio), but I doubt it will be as accessible and fully-featured as a DAISY Digital Talking Book.

From what we have seen so far, these exiting features are provided by the *Windows-only* reader software. Porting this development effort to Mac OS X (or the iPhone OS, or Android, or any Linux variants) would be *very* costly. I think it’s safe to say that the “full power” of the Blio Reader will only be available on Windows desktop, where the screen real estate and computing power are sufficient to render the fixed-size multimedia reading experience (i.e. PDF-like, non-reflowable markup).

With that in mind, I am personally not too exited about the Blio Reader…curious at most, but not enthusiastic. I could be wrong on all accounts of course, let’s hope I am. ;o)

Regards, Dan

[1]
http://www.knfbreader.com/products-kreader-pc.php

Agh, duh. Yeah, that’s exactly the situation — North American Rights. I’ll appeal to lack of sleep for my excuse in blanking on that. But yeah, there should be North American Rights works that ficbot can get in Canada, but you can’t get in Australia; and UK and Commonwealth Rights works that neither of you can get.

Seems to me it’s time for the e-book distributors to join the 21st century and figure out a way to accept files already vetted. That meatgrinder operation sounds ridiculous, and frustrating.

Much of it comes back to the old DRM nonsense. If readers had the ability to manipulate the files to adjust to their readers, they’d be a lot happier, and the publishers would have a lot less work.

We live in a society where the author/publisher must recognize that the consumer is in control. The consumer wants to read their content on their device in their way. Limiting the customers options will limit the exposure of the written word.

Plain text has a low viscosity, throw some figures in there and the viscosity (ability to nicely flow onto the pages) increases dramatically. The industry is in dire need of a set of tools, specifications (EPUB++) and rendering applications that can handle delivering complex documents to a wide range of devices – phones, purpose built reading devices, large monitors, devices for the visually impaired, etc.

In fact, the bulk of ebook complaints I have and have seen online aren’t about presentation (except with PDF rendering and ePub hardwiring) but rather the quality of the *content*.

Ebooks are, first and foremost, about content.
The story.
The information.
Content quality is the publisher’s reponsibility. Editing, proofing, spell-checking, grammar checking, fact-checking (for content sold as non-fiction). Formatting might matter on print books but in the ebook arena, where errors can’t be blamed on faulty typesetting, the finger points straight to the publisher that allowed (often eggregious) content errors to flow straight to the consumer.

Yes, some apps have rendering issues.
And a lot of ebooks ship with poor formatting.
A lot of the better reader apps let the reader override the formatting to compensate for this poor formatting. But no app can fix a poorly proofed book full of grammatical errors or ocr errors. When you see complaints about ebook “quality”, odds are that 60-70% of the time the complaint is about document errors, not technology issues.

Blaming the reading app is like blaming the typesetter. (”Sorry. Itt happens. Its out of our control.”) Old hat. Except there is no typesetter to be the fall guy here and it is *easy* for consumers to verify if and when an issue is caused by the reading app and when it is caused by the ebook. Apps don’t transpose characters or paragraphs, apps don’t substitute the wrong homonym on the fly. Apps don’t mess us content. And way too many ebooks sold come with low quality content.

Blaming the reading apps can be seen as a smokescreen and an effort to actually carrying out a *core* function that properly belongs to the publishers.

At this point in time, ebook buyers are a little too tech savvy to be distracted by those kinds of excuses. Not at a time that the big publishers are flexing their oligopolistic power to raise prices and limit competition.

Forewarned is forearmed: ebooks are no longer going solely to enthusiasts and early adopters who are (somewhat) foregiving, they are going to consumers. We live in a consumerist society and consumers are all too willing to scream bloody murder and demand satisfaction.

High price + low quality = low value in anyone’s book, right?

High prices = high expectations, so the screams are only starting.

“His answer was the iPad, a typically alluring device, featuring a screen big enough for the comfortable reading of books, and a new iBookstore, bringing the text of Harry Potter within reach of America’s millions of iTunes users for the first time.”