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Re: [school-discuss] Digital textbooks



Bill Kendrick wrote:
On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 11:33:43AM -0400, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
  
   The Kindle is technologically a good step forward, but it is should not
   and cannot be used for a number of reasons:

   1) It's a proprietary format
   2) DRM is mandatory
   3) Only available in the US
   4) All book distribution must flow through Amazon
    

This is true of content sold via the Amazon store, and accessible over
their 'whisper net'.  However, you can use non-DRM MobiPocket format
(Amazon's format is apparently just MOBI with a DRM wrapper), and you
can use a USB cable to upload books to the Kindle, regardless of where
you got them and what country you're in.
  
Sure. The Kindle will also read PDFs, I believe. But I also think that the model that Amazon is trying to build/enforce is unsustainable and should be opposed/resisted.

At the recent Toronto BookCamp (un-)conference I presented a session called "Kindle, Shmindle: the future of ebooks in Canada". It was one of the most popular sessions of the event, especially since Canadian publishers don't know what to do while the Kindle is unavailable for purchase here.

If doing without convenience of wireless web-to-reader downloads, then the Kindle has no real advantage over its epub counterparts. And the epub users have the advantage of multiple supported stores and sources of ebooks (including Google's cache of 500,000 public domain titles) Both booksellers and publishers prefer an open market, standards-based approach that doesn't lead to one monopolistic vendor trying to be the single pipeline for everything. Many publishers are already upset over Amazon's squeezing their price-points beyond reason.

EPUB certainly sounds like the way to go.  If you haven't seen it,
look at the open source 'Calibre' set of tools for generating EPUB (as well
as some other ebook formats).
  
I have, and I'm underwhelmed. There are some nice features, but the Calibre user interface is horrendously unintuitive. The screen is dominated by a massive (unlabeled) heart icon which, if clicked, takes you to the web page for sending the author money. Furthermore, Calibre doesn't know if it wants to be a development tool or an end-user library-management app when it grows up -- it just can't be both.

There are other tools such as eCub and Azardi that are better in some ways and worse in others. None of them, for instance, well supports using SVG graphics, a preferred format according to the epub spec. And it's even worse if you're trying to produce books (as I am) that will also function well with text-to-speech systems.

So... for the short term I've resorted to lovingly hand-crafting my current epubs using more-conventional XML tools (mainly quanta), while developing a workflow that will use XSLT and revision control.

Right now, having to deal with grossly immature tools is the price we pay for being on the bleeding edge. ;-)
Things *will* improve....!

- Evan

PS: The website that described the epub standard is http://www.openebook.org