At IDPF Digital Book Forum, discussion of devices—and libraries

The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) held its Digital Book 2007 gathering at Manhattan's McGraw Hill building May 9, drawing a full house of more than 300 attendees—mostly publishers and software/hardware producers. Topics ranged from the need for standards to the latest gadgetry and electronic newspapers and journals—not just books—became part of a broad discussion.

In his opening remarks, IDPF president Steve Potash raised the big question: what about ebooks? Despite the years of hype and despite great strides, Potash said, the public remains in the early stages of a "reading revolution." However, there is momentum, he said, suggesting content producers in the literary realm must work together to achieve the success the DVD has achieved. "The DVD just didn't happen," Potash 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 advised digital content producers to look to libraries to understand how their materials are used and what works—or doesn't work.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for the public remains the absence of a suitable reading device. We are years removed from flops like the Rocket eBook, and advancements in cell phone technology and the advent of PDAs have given more credence to the idea of a reading device, while at the same time raising the issue of just how many gizmos people are willing to carry. Bill McCoy, general manager of Adobe's ePublishing Business unit predicted that no single device will suit everybody when it comes to reading. "Don't wait for the iPod of ebooks," McCoy said "There won't be one."

There were glimmers of hope for digital books, however. McCoy demonstrated 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 electronic 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. Perhaps the most interesting device, however, was also was the simplest and smallest—the size of your pinky. OSoft CEO Mark Carey displayed dotReader, an open-source customizable reading platform written in Perl. Everything comes stored on a flash drive, and when connected to any PC/laptop, dotReader users can call up ebooks or other materials stored in memory and jump from their own stuff to the web or pull things in from the web like RSS feeds.

So, with sales still lagging behind the hype, who's all this technology geared for? According to VitalSource Technologies CEO Frank Daniels, students are the true testing grounds for new technologies and resources and their eventual societal adoption.

Although libraries were frequently discussed and part of the program, few librarians attended the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) Digital Book 2007 gathering at Manhattan's McGraw Hill building. But it was clear that librarians are clearly among the most influential groups pushing electronic content. In a departure from the IDPF's mostly business-oriented panels, Peter Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Federation, and Dale Flecker, of Harvard University Library, made a passionate case for libraries in an era of information as a commodity.

Brantley, who authored an article on print-on-demand for the spring 2007 edition of netConnect 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," He warned that "some people may become disenfranchised in the digital world, when access to the network becomes cheaper than physical things."

Brantley went on to make two additional, critical 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. Traditionally, libraries began as subscription libraries for those who couldn't afford to purchase fiction in commercial venues. In conclusion, Brantley said that books are destined to become "communities" as they are integrated, multiplied, fragmented, collaborative, and shared, and that publishing itself will be reinvented. "Libraries and publishers can change the world," he said, "or it will be transformed anyway."

Flecker gave a historical 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, he described eight challenges to ejournals, which are now "core to what libraries do." In addition to discovery, other issues he highlighted 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.

Brantley had previously asked publishers about persistent URLs to books, and if ISBNs would be used to construct those URLs. The response was silence until a representative from LibreDigital, a service provider working with publishers, suggested that redirects could be enabled at the request of publishers. As WorldCat.org links have also switched from ISBNs to OCLC numbers for permalinks, this question looms large. Will the canonical URL for a book point to Amazon, Google, OCLC, or the Open Content Initiative?

This month, Microsoft's Windows Live Hotmail and the British Library (BL) are teaming up to create a first-ever national archive of email, part of the "celebration" of the launch of the new email service. Microsoft solicited entries in ten categories of email, including blunders, life changers, complaints, spam, love and romance, humor, everyday, news, topical events, and long-distance email.

And what's the British Library doing in collaboration with Microsoft? The company approached the library, BL spokesman Lawrence Christensen told the LJAN, in response to a query, adding, "The British Library engages in collaborations with various corporate and private partners on the delivery of specific projects." He pointed to other collaborations, such as desktop document delivery now available via Google Scholar and the agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a global science gateway. Closer in concept to the Email Britain project was the launch of Windows Vista at the library at the same time Microsoft produced digital versions of Leonardo Da Vinci's Codex Arundel and Codex Leicester.

This one can't make French National Librarian Jean-Noel Jeannenny happy: This week Google announced that the University Library of Lausanne, Switzerland, had become the first library in a French-speaking culture to join Google Book Search. Google and Lausanne will digitize the university's public domain works, including an array of "Swiss and Francophone literature," as well the university's collections of English, German, Latin, Romansch, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish books. Lausanne is the fifth European library to join the Library Project, which also includes Oxford University, University Complutense of Madrid, the Library of Catalunya, and the Bavarian State Library. There are 14 partners worldwide.

Jeannenny, an implacable Google critic, a driving force of French and European digitization effort, and author of Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge, will have to approach his mission from a new post. According to reports in France, Jeannenny was forced to resign last month with rumors swirling that his anti-Google stance and the slow rate of French digitization efforts were factors.

In other Google news, stockholders at last week's meeting voted down a resolution proposed by the New York City Comptroller, "to help protect freedom of access to the Internet." At the meeting, David Drummond, general counsel for Google, recommended that stockholders vote against this proposal, saying applying a rigid set of rules wouldn't necessarily "advance the cause of free expression." The resolution would have precluded Google "engaging in proactive censorship," and would have required Google make publicly available "all cases where legally binding censorship requests have been complied with."