Quote:
Originally Posted by davidfor
@GoNico: I don't consider the issue with annotation sharing or retrieving a issue with copyrights. It is more an issue of standards. To the best of my knowledge, there is no real standard for how annotations are marked in ebooks or stored for sharing. Each ereading device and application basically does its own thing. Some have ways to export to things like EverNote, for others, it is completely contained.
Unfortunately, it doesn't look like something the big companies are interested in fixing, so I can't see anything is likely to change in the near future.
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Not that this is the place to debate such things but just to point out (as someone who has experience with standards bodies, most recently the W3C's new Digital Publishing Working Group)… you are half way to understanding how this is fundamentally a Copyright issue.
Copyright law disallows copying of "too much text" (and a bunch of other stuff). Any move to make it easy for the (human) reader to manipulate too much text—nevermind to share or somehow republish!—takes the developer into dangerous waters. Bad enough for individual companies, from Amazon down, totally a no-go for any type of online, hosted services / platform, let alone a standardized, interoperable one. The legal, political will is not there, and not enough mass-market readers want or need annotation features, so… no one bothers. They do the bare minimum they can get away with, and sometimes we're lucky and they leave a raw text file lying around for plugins like this one to do something with them.
In other words Copyright law has a chilling effect on technology development and marketing for consumer manipulation of content. This has severe repercussions on human cultures, but that's another topic.
In any case, I am SO SO grateful to you do, @davidfor, for maintaining and advancing Annotations. Thank you.