Why Adobe may be good for the new ePub standard e-book format

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

The key is whether it will be a truly open standard that other vendors can produce software to create and view, and not lock you into Adobe as your only option to work with it.

Since ePub is based on open, non-proprietary XHTML, and can be created with simple text and HTML tools (and Winzip), the only way we might get locked into any SW company would be if Adobe begins to add "features" to the ePub package that can only be read by DE and only be created by an Adobe product. Even this won't be enough... everyone has to decide that they must have that feature, and thereby shut out not only other ePub authoring tools, but other ePub readers.

This is how Microsoft won the Browser Wars, and seeing as how acquisitive and aggressive Adobe's been getting lately, it's not beyond the realm of possibility. On the other hand, absolutely any e-book reader could accomplish the same thing, given the right feature set and public demand for it.

The key is the public. Adobe, or any company, can add all the proprietary doodads they want, but it won't lock the public into anything if they don't accept it. So ePub's remaining an open-source format is strictly up to us.

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by BKeeper

I'm absolutely certain there will be plenty of easy and free ways to produce and read ePub documents. Anybody will be able to produce content.
ePub is a great step forward. Proper document structure (which allows reflow) will make the difference.

There were very similar sentiments expressed here about the earlier OEB standards - which proved to be optimistic. So far as I know, there are no open source tools to produce and manage OEB ebooks. The closest is perhaps the Open eBook Validator, which has not been kept up to date (there is no validator for ePub).

I agree that ePub is an advance on OEB. So perhaps that is enough to make ePub work as an open standard. The shoe that has not dropped yet is DRM. OEB was "hijacked" by DRM infested variants such as .mobi and .lit. The same could happen with .epub, but the problem with OEB was not that DRM came into the picture but that the DRM-free pure OEB did not catch on as an alternative. The reading software part of the equation seems to be progressing nicely, and FeedBooks providing .epub books is something that never happened with OEB. What we need now is open source tools to produce .epub ebooks.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

What we need now is open source tools to produce .epub ebooks.

You have it... it's called a "text editor." You really don't need anything more just to produce ePub files (though an HTML editor would be better). The only proprietary part of the process is Winzip.

What I presume you're asking for is a tool to automate the process. I can't imagine that will take long for us to see.

[kovidgoyal]

As far as packing html file(s) and associated resource files into a zip, I will be creating such a tool for libprs500 if/when sony actually supports epub.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

You have it... it's called a "text editor." You really don't need anything more just to produce ePub files (though an HTML editor would be better). The only proprietary part of the process is Winzip.

There's nothing proprietary about Winzip. The late Phil Katz explicitly made the zip format public domain when he created PKZip, and many people have created archiving utilities that can create and extract Zip files.

Winzip is the best known product for Windows, but alternatives exist, many are free, and some are open source as well.

What I presume you're asking for is a tool to automate the process. I can't imagine that will take long for us to see.

Shouldn't take long at all, if there is a large enough perceived need.
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Dennis

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

There's nothing proprietary about Winzip. The late Phil Katz explicitly made the zip format public domain when he created PKZip, and many people have created archiving utilities that can create and extract Zip files.

I did not know this. ePub makes even more sense, in that case!

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

I did not know this. ePub makes even more sense, in that case!

Back in the MS-DOS days, Phil Katz came to prominence in the PC community creating archive and compression utilities. The dominant one back then was a program called ARC by an outfit called Seaware. Phil reverse engineered their format, and created PKARC and PKXARC, which created and extracted ARC format archives. His programs were smaller, faster, more efficient, and had better compression, and rapidly took over. In those days, users called BBS systems over dial up phone lines, and size mattered. When your access to the outside world was a 2400 baud modem, you wanted the files you downloaded to be as small as possible.

Seaware sued for infringement, claiming copyright on their archive format. Phil developed a new format called Zip, and explicitly published the specs for it and dedicated it to the public domain. He also created PKZip and PKUnzip to create and extract zip files. Zip took over, and I'm not sure how many people even remember Seaware now.

Nico Mak was the first one to really develop a Windows zip archiver, and WinZip dominates the market on Windows. Phil's company, PKWare, still exists, and offers versions of zip for things like IBM mainframes. Phil, alas, does not. He drank himself to death a few years ago.

Compression was a topic of considerable interest and research, and everyone was trying to create ever smaller archive files. It was always a trade-off: the higher the compression you achieved, the longer it took to do it, and the more memory was required to perform the task.

There are a number of other archive formats out there with archivers that create them.

In Japan, for example, the dominant one is LHA, which creates LZH archives. That one encountered legal problems here, as well. It uses a compression algorithm known as Lev-Zempel-Welch. Lev and Zempel first devised it, and Terry Welch developed a simpler version that was much easier to implement. Terry was working for what is now Unisys at the time he published his work, and the terms of his contract made stuff he developed their property. Unisys belatedly awoke, realized they had rights to it, and started asking for money. The LZW compression method was the one used in GIF graphics, so web sites posting GIFs suddenly founds themselves being dunned. The PNG (Portable Network Graphics) image format was created specifically to have a format unencumbered by intellectual property considerations so the problem wouldn't recur.

Another relatively popular one is RAR, created by Eugene Rorshal. RAR files provide slightly better compression than zip, and have an assortment of features like multi-media support, user definable part size, and enhanced recovery features that make them a popular choice for people doing things like posting to binary newsgroups. Eugene released public domain code to open RAR achives, but only his RAR and WinRAR programs can create them.

On Macintoshes, the dominant archiver is Stuffit, producing SIT files.

Unix systems treat archiving and compression as separate operations. Archives are normally created by "tar" (tape archiver), and then compressed by pack, compress, or gzip

There are many others, and I have four different archivers installed here to cover all the bases. In practice, I normally only create Zip files, but I want to be able to extract any archive.

But as mentioned, there's nothing proprietary about zip files. Lots of things can create and extract them, and the tools exist for every platform I'm aware of. I even have a utility on my Palm OS PDA that can extract from zip files.
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Dennis