IDPF Hosts Digital Book 2007

The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) held its Digital Book 2007 gathering at its standard digs in Manhattan's McGraw-Hill building May 9. The event drew a full house of more than 300 attendees—mostly publishers of every ilk and software/hardware producers. While libraries frequently were on the radar and Rick Weingarten, director of the American Library Association's Office for Information Technology Policy, sits on IDPF's board, few librarians were on hand, though they are among the most influential groups pushing electronic content. Topics ranged from the need for standards to the latest gadgetry, and the discussions no longer solely concerned books, as electronic newspapers and journals also got their props.

In his opening remarks, IDPF prexy Steve Potash addressed the question on everyone's collective mind: while ebooks have been under discussion for what now seems ages, when “are they really going to happen?” Not quite yet. Despite great strides, Potash contends that the public still is in the early stages of the “reading revolution,” though there is momentum. Potash used the example of the DVD's Goliath success as a message to content producers that they must work together to mimic that success. “The DVD just didn't happen,” he said. “There were lots of challenges to agreeing on a single format, but the [movie] industry came together, and the results are legendary.” Potash also said that e-content producers should look to libraries to understand how their materials are used and what works or not.

The greatest challenge of ebooks always has been the need for an accompanying handheld reading device, with many different designs, from the Rocket eBook on up, rotting in their graves. The advent of cell phones and the Blackberry has given more credence to the reading device while at the same time raising the issue of how many gizmos people are willing to carry. One hopes a bunch—or better, that U.S. manufacturers will catch up to their European counterparts and offer cell phones capable of everything from storing ebooks to delivering Internet connectivity and television to calling mom.

Bill McCoy, general manager of Adobe's ePublishing Business unit, advised, “Don't wait for the iPod of ebooks; there won't be one,” predicting, alas, that no single device will suit everyone. He did offer a glimmer of hope by demonstrating the Adobe Digital Edition, an open XML format authoring tool that can be used on small-screen devices. Willem Endhoven of iRex Technologies brought the firm's iLiad portable device, which has separate buttons for e-newspapers, ebooks, personal documents, and printing. Wi-Fi-enabled, the iLiad can be updated with as many as ten newspapers daily and can hold 3000 ebooks with the addition of a memory card.

There were lots of cool devices, but the coolest of the cool also was the smallest—the size of your pinky—and simplest. OSoft CEO Mark Carey displayed dotReader, an open source customizable reading platform written in Perl. All the source code is published and freely available on the web and requires no installation. Everything comes stored on a flash drive, and when connected to any PC/laptop, dotReader lets users call up ebooks or other materials stored in memory and jump from their own items to the web or pull things in from the web like RSS feeds. dotReader also includes search and multimedia capabilities.

So who's using all this? According to VitalSource Technologies CEO Frank Daniels, students are the true testing ground for new technologies/resources and their adoption. “Students want content on many different levels,” he said. Moreover, the younger generation is so attuned and adaptable to new technology that for them it's an either/and world—they don't choose one technology; they use everything. They like to share—legally and illegally—are loyal to favorite products and services, and are proactive in publicizing the good stuff to their friends.

Jonathan Stowe, senior VP and chief technology officer for Thomson Higher Education (just sold, see News, p. 18), praised the glories of digital textbooks; they're half the price of paper and allow students to search quickly for the exact info needed for term papers, tests, and so on. Most publishers offer complete books, but the pay-as-you-go model for individual chapters, which can sell for as little as $1.99, is gaining.

So, where do libraries fit in? Depends on whom you ask. Matt Shatz, VP, Random House Digital, discussed Insight, the publisher's online service that gives search engines and online retailers access to digitized book content over the web. Shatz said the idea behind Insight was to “turn on the fire hose of discovery. There's so much online use, and books are far too absent from that swirl of activity.” He demoed a “widget,” which allows sample texts and other materials to be copied to web sites, blogs, or networks for retailers/authors to promote their books. Librarians also could copy the widgets to their homepages to highlight the works of local authors, guest speakers, and more.

Google presented a plan to entice publishers to buy into two upcoming models for making money from Google Book Search, including a weekly rental “that resembles a library loan” and a purchase option “much like a bookstore,” said Tom Turvey, director of Google Book Search Partnerships. The personal library would allow search across the books, expiration and rental, and copy and paste. No pricing was announced.

The new program raises significant privacy and intellectual freedom questions, if Google's circulation records can be correlated with all the other information it stores. Additionally, quality control questions regarding Google's scanning are significant and growing, voiced by historian Robert Townsend and others (see Newsletters, LJ Academic Newswire, 5/3/07).

In a departure from the other business-oriented panels, Peter Brantley, executive director, Digital Library Federation, and Dale Flecker of Harvard University Librarymade a passionate case for libraries in an era of information as a commodity. Brantley led with a slightly ominous series of slides: “Libraries buy books (for a while longer),” followed by a reminder of the book as a physical object, “Libraries don't always own what is in the book” just “the book (the 'thing' of the book).” He then reiterated the classic rights that libraries protect: the right to borrow, to browse, to privacy, and to learn, and warned that “some people may become disenfranchised in the digital world, when access to the network becomes cheaper than physical things.” Given the announcement from Turvey, above, this made sense.

Brantley made two additional points: “Libraries must permanently hold the wealth of our many cultures to preserve fundamental rights, and access to books must be either free or low cost for the world's poor.” He departed from conventional thinking on access, though, arguing that low-cost access doesn't need to include fiction.

Finally, Brantley said that books will become communities as they are integrated, multiplied, fragmented, collaborative, and shared and publishing itself will be reinvented. His conclusion contained an air of inevitability, as he said, “Libraries and publishers can change the world, or it will be transformed anyway.” [Note: Brantley's article on print on demand (netConnect, Spring 2007, p. 10–13) is available.]

Flecker gave an overview of the challenges libraries have grappled with in the era of digital information. Instead of talking about ebooks, which he said represent only two percent of use at Harvard, Flecker described eight challenges to e-journals, which are now “core to what libraries do.” Library consultant October Ivins challenged this statistic about ebook usage as irrelevant, saying, “Harvard isn't typical” and that there were 20 ebook platforms demonstrated at the 2006 Charleston Conference, though discovery is still an issue.

In addition to discovery, e-journal issues Flecker highlighted that are relevant to ebooks include licensing, perpetual access, usage statistics, and linking. He noted that while article-level linking in journals has proven to be sufficient, the equivalent for ebooks (the page?) has not yet been established. Previously, Brantley had asked publishers about persistent URLs for books and if ISBNs would be used to construct those URLs. There was total silence, and then a rep from LibreDigital, a digital service provider, suggested that redirects could be enabled at publisher request. As WorldCat.org links have also switched from ISBN to OCLC number for permalinks, this seems like an interesting question. Will the canonical URL for a book point to Amazon, Google, OCLC, or the Open Content Initiative?