LIVIU: Thanks for your thoughts, a useful reminder of priorities. You already know of the dotreader.com site, and plans are for book in the OpenReader format to appear in the next few months. Things are happening. That's one reason why I'm running out of time to reply to the rather repetitious arguments of Ben, who apparently is busy accumulating brownie points with potential consulting clients. I think OpenReader and other activities should come ahead of answering Ben.
Meanwhile I do understand that the IDPF is a group to which he has emotional attachments, that his motives are not just financial; but it would help if he stepped back and acknowleged the complexities here. We need a sound methodology in place to do e-book standards--better than the one that hasn't worked since the 1990s. See "Standards Rot and the Tower of eBabel" (
http://www.teleread.org/blog/?p=5157).
Jon Noring and I have identified the main causes of the IDPF's dysfunctionality in the standards area. The question is whether the group will have the integrity and discipline to act.
The IDPF could make valuable contributions to e-bookdom if it focused on being a trade organization, not a standards groups where just one company presides over both of the crucial standards committee. Move standards to a place with a greater depth and diversity of talent.
BEN: Do email me the text of the supposedly censored message, and I'll add it to the original thread. I will say that you don't appreciate the complexities of WordPress-related spam filtering or you'd understand why some legit comments don't get through. Other blogs have the same problem that the TeleRead one does.
As for Jon, your divide-and-conquer tactics are pretty evident even though you've lapsed into some anti-Noring canards. Quite objectively Jon will tell you that the IDPF does not represent e-bookdom right now--based if nothing else on the composition of the board.
Meanwhile I myself have a stake in the standards matters rather directly as both a reader and a writer. I'm sick of seeing the interests of the usual suspects come ahead of those of us content people. The e-book market is just a shadow of what it could be, and the Tower of eBabel, so long tolerated by the IDPF, is among the major reasons.
Thanks,
David
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Originally Posted by Liviu_5
Hi,
The above debate is very interesting but to a large extent it reminds me of the angels on the pin debate of lore.
I would love to see ebooks in OpenReader but let us see them. I would love to see ebooks in the IDPF standard but let us see them.
Right now I see lit (my proprietary format of choice), prc, pdf, smaller market prop formats, and html/rtf/txt as open formats
As far as I can see the current opf format is pretty rarely used as such these days though it may be used to create books in the above proprietary formats.
I read some opf books with Fbreader on Nokia and I like the interactivity in short stories magazines/books (as of now I bought over 30 of emagazines/short story collections, I subscribe to easimov's and plan to subscribe to efsf when my print subscription runs out)
Liviu
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