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Originally Posted by Bob Russell
But major players in the e-book industry, including names like Adobe, MobiPocket, Motricity, iRex and eBook Technologies have all come together and it is quite possible that one of the largest obstacles for e-book adoption has been conquered as a result.
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It's a bit misleading to mention Adobe: as far as I can see, there is nothing in either the publication format or the container format that involved Adobe products or formats. At least not yet, anyway, though there seem to be some future plans for embeddable typefaces.
It's clearly a publishers' format. It's not possible to say if it will be a readers' format. Reader system conformance requirements is also a future development.
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Secondly, supporters are acting in line with their positions. Specifically, they are really going to implement the standards in places like the iRex Iliad e-ink book reader.
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It won't be very expensive to implement a reader. Unless I've missed something important, any reasonably modern web browser will do the job. (If decryption and DRM is wanted, extra functionality is required.)
Unicode is the character set, which is good, but readers seem free to refuse to display any Unicode character as well, which is less useful. I can't at present see that I can use anything in the documents to ensure that the book I create here will be readable on a reader over there -- which seems counter-intuitive. (Section 1.3.6 if you want to chew on it for yourselves.)
Until there is such a guarantee, this announcement is only an appetizer.
I'm not sure if or how the
OpenReader Consortium are related -- but they seem to be doing something very similar, though they don't have as many big names on their membership list. The OpeanReader feature set at least mentions hyphenation and widow/orphan issues. (Jon Noring is in both groups, I see.)