               Tennant: Digital Libraries
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Digital Books ReduxJuly 11, 2007 A few weeks ago Adobe announced the availability of Adobe Digital Editions 1.0, an ebook platform that at first look is quite impressive. A free reader is available for Windows and Mac, and according to the web site, versions for "Linux platforms and localized versions in French, German, Japanese, Korean and Chinese are expected to be available in the second half of 2007."Part of what is impressive is that besides supporting Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) it supports an open de facto standard for XHTML-encoded ebooks called the Open Publication Structure. This standard is produced and maintained by an industry group called the Interational Digital Publishing Forum, of which (no surprise) Adobe Systems is a member, as is the Digital Library Federation and my employer, OCLC. For publishers not wanting their content to be open, Adobe offers their proprietary technology for locking down the content. Download and install the reader and you may be pleasantly surprised. Or, better yet, simply browse the sample library and download a book that looks good. If you don't already have the reader, it will download and install then and there. One of the interface behaviors that I found impressive with an OPS-encoded book is that when you scroll it always jumps a complete page. That is, no matter how you resize the window, even when in the middle of reading a book, when you click on the scroll button it does it a page at a time based on exactly how the window is currently sized. Therefore, there are no "hard" pages, but only "soft" ones, and once you get used to this behavior you never worry about scrolling past where you wanted to be. Another useful feature is that whenever you quit the application it remembers exactly where you left off. You can resize the text to a comfortable reading size and string search the text (i.e., a search for "the" will find "the", "they", "there", etc.). For a 1.0 release, it isn't bad, and well worth watching. Posted by Roy Tennant on July 11, 2007 | Comments (1) Industries: News & Features
August 27, 2007
In response to: Digital Books Redux dfflanders commented: Also worth taking a look at a British library funded platform for eBook reading called "Turning the Pages" by a small Media Co called Armadillo. It has recently been funded by Microsoft to make the jump into a e-book platform. Question is, who will make preservale annotation on these virtual books possible?
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