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Old 02-13-2008, 09:59 AM   #1
Hadrien
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Adobe DE 1.5 Beta

Adobe released the first beta for Adobe DE 1.5: http://blogs.adobe.com/digitaleditions/

Download: Adobe Labs

You can find plenty of epub files to test Adobe DE 1.5 at: http://www.feedbooks.com

Quote:
The key feature of Digital Editions 1.5 is the addition of new DRM support that provides "content portability" across computers and devices that you authorize with your Adobe ID.
Note: You should be aware that this beta release includes an enhanced version of DRM (Digital Rights Management) protection. If you plan on using Digital Editions for mission critical work, please consider using Digital Editions 1.0.

Key features of the enhanced DRM include:
- Conversion of user's content to a "Named Authorization" license, enabling them to be backed up, copied and read on other computers or devices
- Authorization of end users' DRM protected content with an Adobe ID
- Writing the secure license into the document
- Existing content is migrated to the new system and newly downloaded content is automatically converted when it is downloaded
- Content portability applies to both PDF and EPUB documents
- Resulting documents can be copied just like any other file
- Documents can be opened on any computer or device which has been authorized by the owner
- The number of machines that can be authorized is controlled by the amount set by the Authorization server (up to 6 computers and 6 devices)
- We have added functionality within Digital Editions 1.5 to support mobile devices. At this time we are working hard on rolling out support for the actual devices which work with Digital Editions, which should become available later this year.
- The number of machines on which a document can be viewed is limited by the number of authorized machines, unless the document has been limited to a single machine by the publisher

Note that authorization with an Adobe ID will not be required in the final release of 1.5, but is strongly recommended. If you do not authorize your computer, your content will, as in Digital Editions 1.0, be locked to the computer to which is was downloaded. This first Beta release does not actually offer the option to use the old-style "anonymous" mode of use, but the next Beta and the final release version will. But Adobe feels very strongly that all users will be best served by authorizing their computers. Adobe does not use the ID for any purpose other than providing the portability by identifying you and your books. The ID is not used for any other purpose, public or private.

Publishers and vendors should note that this release does not alter the fulfillment of ebooks so existing ecommerce workflows are not affected.

In addition to the DRM enhancement, this release of Digital Editions also
- Adds support for Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard)
- Fixes a bug in which double-byte (e.g. Asian, some European) users could not use Digital Editions
- Improved PDF support, including more complete support for the Adobe transparency model and support for named pages
- Page map support in EPUB so that there is a mapping between the reflowed screens and the paper copy of a book
- Adds support for multiple books per ETD fulfillment
- Miscellaneous user interface improvements and bug fixes
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Old 02-13-2008, 10:07 AM   #2
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"We have added functionality within Digital Editions 1.5 to support mobile devices. At this time we are working hard on rolling out support for the actual devices which work with Digital Editions, which should become available later this year."
Bring it on! Of course for me to take advantage of it, both Adobe and Sony have work to do. So my real expectation is that "later this year" means, at best, "sometime much later".

Thanks for the info, Hadrien!
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Old 02-13-2008, 10:23 AM   #3
Hadrien
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Good timing, I've just updated our epub output at Feedbooks to be 100% valid with epubcheck
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Old 02-13-2008, 11:31 AM   #4
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OK, I removed Adobe DE 1.0 and installed 1.5 instead. Had to create an account to launch this beta using their new ID system. The software detected that I'm french, and I automatically get the french translation.

I can see that a few bugs got fixed (in DE 1.0, it used to display a blank page every now and then if I directly opened a file instead of adding the file to the library), and some of the new features are pretty good. I really like the idea of the page map feature for example:
Quote:
Page map support in EPUB so that there is a mapping between the reflowed screens and the paper copy of a book
It's still a little slow when you open a new file, I wonder if they store the pagination or re-calculate everything each time you open the file.
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Old 02-13-2008, 12:01 PM   #5
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Still no Linux version...
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Old 02-13-2008, 01:46 PM   #6
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Hadrien,

Your book is slow because the chapters are not splitted into separate flows. While technically it does not violate the spec (and it passes epubcheck), it places very high processing burden on the reading system. It will only be worse on the handhelds, which might not even be able to load the whole book because of the memory/CPU constraints.

This is a common problem and Digital Editions beta detects this. When you see a slowdown, check "Item info" and if you see this message: "Document contains a resource which is too long", there is a good chance that this book won't be fully readable on handhelds.

Peter Sorotokin
Adobe Systems - Digital Publishing
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Old 02-13-2008, 02:02 PM   #7
Hadrien
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Sorotokin View Post
Hadrien,

Your book is slow because the chapters are not splitted into separate flows. While technically it does not violate the spec (and it passes epubcheck), it places very high processing burden on the reading system. It will only be worse on the handhelds, which might not even be able to load the whole book because of the memory/CPU constraints.

This is a common problem and Digital Editions beta detects this. When you see a slowdown, check "Item info" and if you see this message: "Document contains a resource which is too long", there is a good chance that this book won't be fully readable on handhelds.

Peter Sorotokin
Adobe Systems - Digital Publishing
Well, most of the samples files that I've seen around used a single file too. In our case we use multiple .xml files but a single one for the main content of the book.

I've just tried opening War and Peace in DE 1.5 (that's usually my worst case scenario) and although it gets pretty slow when you open the main content, I don't get the warning.

I could make some work on the way we generate our files, but in some cases, we'd still get very long flows (for example a book from Proust or Ulysses from James Joyce).

Edit: Maybe you did not translated the alerts ?
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Old 02-13-2008, 02:45 PM   #8
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Hadrien,

You are probably right, I do not think we are fully done with translating, so it might just not show up in French.

And it is not really one vs. multiple files, it's just the size of a single flow.

Peter
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Old 02-13-2008, 02:51 PM   #9
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Sorotokin View Post
Hadrien,

You are probably right, I do not think we are fully done with translating, so it might just not show up in French.

And it is not really one vs. multiple files, it's just the size of a single flow.

Peter
Yes I understand how it works, you're basically parsing a full file.

But for example, a book from Proust, is at best, divided into two parts. A single sentence can last through multiple pages.

How can the content producer deal with such a file ?
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Old 02-13-2008, 02:53 PM   #10
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Peter, a very big MobileRead welcome to you!

It's great to have someone associated with DE willing to offer us a bit of advice!

We wouldn't want you to feel pressured, but please do know that we appreciate it.
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Old 02-13-2008, 03:07 PM   #11
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Sorotokin View Post
Your book is slow because the chapters are not splitted into separate flows. While technically it does not violate the spec (and it passes epubcheck), it places very high processing burden on the reading system. It will only be worse on the handhelds, which might not even be able to load the whole book because of the memory/CPU constraints.
Am I missing something about processing the EPUB format? If there is a page break at the start of each chapter (say), why does it matter whether chapters are in separate flows or not. Even if they are in one flow, it should then still be ok to process each chapter separately (perhaps with a rescan to capture CSS info or other metadata). If this is not the case, that would seem to be a serious deficiency in the format.
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Old 02-13-2008, 03:16 PM   #12
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Quote:
Originally Posted by wallcraft View Post
Am I missing something about processing the EPUB format? If there is a page break at the start of each chapter (say), why does it matter whether chapters are in separate flows or not. Even if they are in one flow, it should then still be ok to process each chapter separately (perhaps with a rescan to capture CSS info or other metadata). If this is not the case, that would seem to be a serious deficiency in the format.
It's not a problem with the format itself, it's about how you process such a file.
I can understand why it's much easier to implement the parsing of the whole file instead of using a buffer for example.

But it's gonna be very complicated to ask every content producer to divide the flows this way between multiple files. In my case, I can do it for most books, but I can think of a few books where it wouldn't be possible (a page break is automatically added between different flows right ? There's some books with no page breaks at all). Maybe some pre-processing (if a flow is too long, divide it into multiple flows without page breaks between the flows) on the reading system would be possible ?
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Old 02-13-2008, 03:20 PM   #13
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Note that authorization with an Adobe ID will not be required in the final release of 1.5, but is strongly recommended.
Too bad it's required in this beta. I don't want to have an Adobe ID, so I wont test this beta ...

Quote:
If you do not authorize your computer, your content will, as in Digital Editions 1.0, be locked to the computer to which is was downloaded. This first Beta release does not actually offer the option to use the old-style "anonymous" mode of use, but the next Beta and the final release version will.
I don't really understand (i'm slow I know... ). Does this mean any epub document, even those without DRM, won't be able to be transferred to handheld devices, or other computer ? Or maybe this is the "old-style anonymous mode" ?

Quote:
But Adobe feels very strongly that all users will be best served by authorizing their computers. Adobe does not use the ID for any purpose other than providing the portability by identifying you and your books. The ID is not used for any other purpose, public or private.
I think I'll pass for now ...
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Old 02-13-2008, 04:13 PM   #14
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Quote:
But for example, a book from Proust, is at best, divided into two parts. A single sentence can last through multiple pages.

How can the content producer deal with such a file ?
Hey, you are not making it easy for me, are you? I have to agree, arbitrarily breaking a text like that feels like a crime against literature.

All I really want to say is that it won't work all that great with the current version of our software. Moreover, it will always work best if a book which has natural breaking points is broken up into separate flows. At some point we'll figure out how to deal with books like cannot be easily broken into chapters as well, but we have to start somewhere.

Quote:
Am I missing something about processing the EPUB format? If there is a page break at the start of each chapter (say), why does it matter whether chapters are in separate flows or not. Even if they are in one flow, it should then still be ok to process each chapter separately (perhaps with a rescan to capture CSS info or other metadata). If this is not the case, that would seem to be a serious deficiency in the format.
It is possible to insert page break just by using CSS page-break-before:always, of course. However when writing software to process it, especially if your code has to work on a small device, there are a lot of differences between the page break in the flow and page breaks between the flows. You are right that it is possible to format starting at any page break, including a break inside the flow. However, CSS cascade and processing (e.g. counters) have to be done for the whole file - that's just how CSS works. That is also possible to optimize. The problem is that taking advantage of these possibilities is not all that easy. And by the nature of the format, the content which is broken in many flows will always work better than the single-flow content.

Quote:
Too bad it's required in this beta. I don't want to have an Adobe ID, so I wont test this beta ...
Sorry to hear that.

Quote:
Does this mean any epub document, even those without DRM, won't be able to be transferred to handheld devices, or other computer ?
There is are no software-enforced restictions of non-DRMed content, of course.

Peter
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Old 02-13-2008, 04:29 PM   #15
Hadrien
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Hey, you are not making it easy for me, are you? I have to agree, arbitrarily breaking a text like that feels like a crime against literature.

All I really want to say is that it won't work all that great with the current version of our software. Moreover, it will always work best if a book which has natural breaking points is broken up into separate flows. At some point we'll figure out how to deal with books like cannot be easily broken into chapters as well, but we have to start somewhere.
Yeah, I'm basically taking THE book that you don't want to break into multiple flows...
I'll see what I can do about the size of the flows, it'll make things a bit more complicated for the NCX file too.

Now for a very different issue: in our epub books on Feedbooks we usually have links pointing to some other epub files. At the beginning of the file, we link to other books from the same author, and at the end of the book we link to recommendations.
If you click on one of those links, it'll open the browser, download, and then open the file in DE. It would be a much better process if it somehow detected that this link is for DE, and that it should add the new download to DE's library.
A very simple solution for this would be to use a rel tag, like in some microformats: http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-design-pattern
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