E-Books – The Bigger Problem, Part One of Three

[Nate the great]

I found an interesting (but really really long) post ove on the Dangerous Precedents. If he ever gets to the point it will be a good read.

http://benhammersley.com/2009/12/e-b...-one-of-three/

[Jim Lester]

I read it but you have to realize he is talking about doing digital editions of magazines and not what we normally consider "eBooks". This quote form part 2 is telling:

The ebook (or emagazine, or whatever you want to call it),will not simply consist of a monthly edition of a collection of pages

If you read the article with that in mind Part 1 will make a lot more sense. The central premise that for magazines (monthly serialized content) it is not a slam dunk to take content that is originally aimed to a specific print format to digital editions that can be targeted at any number of devices (screen size/color/capabilites/OS's/etc...), and it is.

[brecklundin]

otherwise cable "TV" for your ebooks, right? All subscription based and no way to chose your individual "stations"? I am wary of that situation from companies like Hearst and whoever backs the Que for their periodical content...it will finally be a way for these companies to charge for the web articles. Gotta love how the AmeriCorps pervert everything from perfectly fine, self regulating and free into complicated mess. I hope that is not going to be the end result of the newest print media backed reading devices. I guess my concern is they will turn our ereaders into the same bunch of crap cell phones are today.

EDIT: oops, never mind...wrong article. I was thinking this was an article I read recenlty, dunno where...sigh...but it was about what might happen given how comapnies like Hearst do business historically...d'oh???!!

[WT Sharpe]

From a publishing standpoint, too, e-books are thrilling: the dirty jobs of printing and distribution fall away, replaced with an upload to the iTunes store –

iTunes has ebooks? All I see in the iTunes store are apps that allow you to buy ebooks from other vendors. But that’s a minor point. Perhaps Mr. Hammersley is envisioning the future.

As for his proposed method of using a markup language for all magazine submissions, it seems promising, but also seems to entail a whole lot more work. Certainly it would speed up the process of searching for particular items. A search for <company identifier=”APPL”>Apple</company> for example would bring up only results related to that company, while a generic search for "apple" would bring up everything from the adventures of Adam and Eve to the Beatles. I wonder, though, how much extra work this will be on the editors and proof-readers who will be dealing with texts that are stuffed with these identifiers?

[m-reader]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

As for his proposed method of using a markup language for all magazine submissions, it seems promising, but also seems to entail a whole lot more work. Certainly it would speed up the process of searching for particular items. A search for <company identifier=”APPL”>Apple</company> for example would bring up only results related to that company, while a generic search for "apple" would bring up everything from the adventures of Adam and Eve to the Beatles. I wonder, though, how much extra work this will be on the editors and proof-readers who will be dealing with texts that are stuffed with these identifiers?

I would be surprised if there isn't an XML standard for this out there already (I'd suggest visiting Oasis Open Standards for some examples).
This can be addressed by the "semantic web" approach (OWL is one standard). In a nutshell these standards deal with adding metadata to information on the internet, so that you for example know that the Apple you are writing about is a fruit, rather than the company name.
So again, the technology is here, we just need to use it.

[dsingh]

Bottom line (as I read it) : hyperlink everything to hell --- intellitxt, anyone ?

Thanks, but no thanks. I like my information metadata free.

-ds

[pking36330]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

iTunes has ebooks? All I see in the iTunes store are apps that allow you to buy ebooks from other vendors.

iTunes does have ebooks, you just missed it. iTunes also has apps that allow purchase from other vendors, but it also has 'single ebook as an app' ebooks available for purchase right from iTunes.