Bill McCoy

May 20, 2008

AAP EPUB Endorsement On Target

It's great news that the Association of American Publisher (AA) last week published an open letter endorsing IDPF EPUB as a standard eBook distribution format. On the O'Reilly TOC blog Andrew Savikis dinged AAP Director Ed McCoyd's letter for missing the boat in its calls to action from the AAP to the IDPF. From my perspective, it's Andrew that missed the boat: the AAP points he criticized were on target and fully appropriate given the real-world situation.

Andrew says he's "not clear why it's the IDPF's problem to deal with conversion into non-standard formats" and quality assurance of the results. But this is the AAP, comprised solely of publishers, speaking to the IDPF, a broader group that in particular includes the eBook format and device vendors. It seems perfectly appropriate for AAP to make sure it's on record with vendors that the job isn't done just in having a neutral open standard for intermediate distribution of reflow-centric content. Ideally all the proprietary distribution formats will go away over time, but meantime the conversions and resulting quality issues are very real.

Andrew also pooh-poohed the letter's request that the IDPF consider how to handle books that benefit from a particular final-form presentation. At one level I agree with Andrew on this - there is a perfectly good open standard for handling final-form content: PDF, an AIIM/ISO standard (PDF/A subset and soon the full magilla) - my own quibble with Ed's letter was the poor wording choice that made it sound like AAP was lumping PDF in with proprietary eBook formats. Anyway, the IDPF has wisely steered away from reinventing the wheel in this area. However, there is demand for distribution-ready eBooks that can deliver both a high-quality final form printable representation as well as a dynamic reflow-centric structure-oreinted representation.

There are a few ways to skin this cat: PDF and EPUB versions could be combined into a single distributable file, and it's possible to extend EPUB as Adobe has done in Digital Editions and InDesign CS3 to support master page templates and dynamically switching between them based on variables such as screen size and user font size preference. IDPF could have a role to play in standardizing the PDF/EPUB combination approach, and Adobe has committed to submitting our XSL-FO based template extension for consideration for future standardization under the EPUB umbrella. Where PDF is full "WYSIWYG" (What You See Is What You Get"), EPUB w/ page templates could be considered "WYSIOO" (What You See Is One Option). Base EPUB simply doesn't deliver this capability - it was deemed out of scope for the last round of working group efforts.

But there's certainly a broad range of use cases for richer presentational delivery combined with the ability to adapt content to different sized screens. AAP includes publishing segments with different levels of requirements around page fidelity and printability, so it seems perfectly reasonable for the AAP to put IDPF on notice that while it's great to have an industry standard reflow-centric format, our work is not yet fully complete so long as choosing that format (w/out extensions) means giving up any ability to describe preferred page-level layout information. Certainly Adobe agrees - thats' why we chose to implement the XPTG template extension in our software.

Stepping back, I totally agree with Andrew that "making the transition from designing books to be consumed primarily in print with ebooks as an afterthought, toward designing books intended to remain digital throughout their lifecycle " should be a major focus. I just don't see the AAP's requests as being out of synch wiith that over-arching goal. It's been over six months since EPUB 1.0 was approved, so from where I sit, it's not too overly demanding for the AAP to start asking the IDPF "what have you done for me lately?".

December 19, 2007

Kindlling eBook Openness

Amazon Kindle has certainly accelerated awareness and interest in eBooks. My spouse, son, and I have been sharing (i.e. fighting over) a Kindle for the last couple of weeks, and the consensus opinion is that Amazon definitely got some things very right with its solution. Seamless, untethered acquisition of content really does transform the experience. The widely noted complaints around 1980s-esque appearance and usability issues (can't hold without accidentally pressing buttons) certainly are factors - the Sony Reader 505 is a much more refined industrial design. But the real barrier with Kindle is much more fundamental: it's an entirely closed system.

Buying eBooks in a proprietary vendor-specific format that can only be used on that vendor's device is a mug's game. Kindle is far more closed even than iPod, which started out and have remained primarily players for MP3s, easily made from any audio CD. While Kindle supports a couple of non-DRM publication formats (unfortunately not yet PDF or EPUB), there's almost no supply of non-DRM commercial content, a situation unlikely to change any time soon. Amazon touts 90,000 titles on the Kindle Store but searching for any topic will quickly reveal that it's still quite a thin selection - a substantial number of the titles seem to be relatively obscure treatises and for-sale DRMed versions of public domain works. Leaving aside quality issues with the titles, Kindle Store selection of consumer-relevant content feels somewhat less comprehensive than an average major-airport bookstore. Underwhelming, yes - but the real zinger is that you're completely out of luck if Amazon's sole-source store doesn't have what you want to read.

For a healthy eBook ecosystem, readers need to be able to choose where they want to get their content, and where they want to read it. That's what Adobe is working to enable. Admittedly we still have a lot of work to do, but there's going to be some major steps forward in the very near future. Sony and Adobe announced back in June that Sony Reader products would gain support for the EPUB open eBook standard, reflow capabiliies for PDF, and Adobe's DRM, supported by hundreds of online bookstores and libraries. Adobe has also noted that we'll be enhancing the DRM support in Adobe Digital Editions to enable content transfer across multiple PCs and devices. Yesterday Adobe open sourced a tool to validate EPUB titles for conformance to the IDPF standard.

Heading off to a sunny beach, Kindle in hand, I thank Amazon for taking eBooks a major step forward in 2007, and I applaud Jeff Bezos and the Lab126 team for their creativity and persistence. Amazon clearly has an incentive to maximize its retail opportunities. As the open eBook ecosystem grows, dedicated reading devices, convergence devices, and PCs improve as platforms for reading, and it becomes clear that "cornering the market" with a sole-source/sole-device solution is not going to fly, I hope that Amazon (already an IDPF member) will end up becoming a major participant in, and contributor to, the broader digital publishing ecosystem.

October 26, 2007

Hachette Book Group standardizes on Open epub Format

Today Hachette Book Group announced that it will no longer be delivering eBook content to distribution channels in proprietary file formats, becoming the first major publisher to announce adoption of the IDPF epub standard. This move, coming hard on the heels of formal approval of the core standard just weeks ago, underlines the costs and hassles publishers have faced dealing with a plethora of incompatible proprietary eBook file formats, and many other publishers are expected to follow suit. Additional coverage from The Book Standard and Publishers Weekly.

The increasing mainstream adoption of digital publishing and eBooks - noted in today's Telegraph - stands to be significantly accelerated by convergence to open interoperable standards for eBooks. Hachette's move also signals the breadth of support for open standards: this is not one or a few companies getting together to dictate a solution. The IDPF's nearly 100 members include publishers, technology vendors, trade and textbook publishers, educational institutions, libraries and other governmental bodies, and this group unanimously approved the new epub standards earlier this month. The point is not to advantage any single vendor or publisher, but that the industry as a whole can only grow if we create an open, healthy ecosystem that inspires confidence on the part of publisher and consumers. There's more work to do - DRM is still a tough nut - but with epub providing the open standard complement to PDF for reflow-centric text-based content, we are well on our way.

October 25, 2007

What's the Future of iTunes Store?

Interesting Slate article Apple vs. Everyone by Ivan Askwith, focusing on the recent new alternatives to Apple's online music distribution hegemony and potential future scenarios for both music and video .

The article glosses over the key point that "iTunes" is not synonymous with "iTunes Store". Even the new directly-competitive Amazon Music Store prominently touts right on its top banner "All songs compatible with iTunes...". It's interesting that Apple's dominance of PC music library software is somewhat independent of iTunes Store and even iPod - and is predicated on Apple's support of the open standard MP3 format. With only 22 iTunes Store songs per iPod there would be an awful lot of empty iPods and iTunes libraries if it weren't for unprotected MP3s from CDs and other sources.

Could one possible outcome be for Apple to retain its PC music player dominance by supporting multiple stores, and maybe even non-Apple devices, more explicitly in iTunes? Or will the linkage between iTunes and iTunes Store grow ever tighter, with users seeking freedom of choice in content sources and downstream devices forced to seek elsewhere for well-integrated PC music library solutions? And how will this shake out for other content types? In music Apple certainly has the pole position - but for video downloads it's stil early days and other solutions - including our forthcoming Adobe Media Player - are certainly still in the hunt.

For eBooks and other text-based content I think it's even less likely that we'll see a single monolithic end-to-end solution with majority market share. There are just too many channels via which books, magazines, and other publications get out to readers. The Slate article points out that Universal controls "one out of every three new albums sold in the United States" - print publishing has consolidated quite a bit but no one has that kind of control. That's why Adobe's supporting open eBook standards, including PDF and IDPF epub, making sure our Digital Editions software supports acquisition from the user's choice of Web-based retailers and libraries, and working to enable multiple devices to consume this content.

August 27, 2007

Adobe Strengthens Digital Publishing Business Team

I’m very pleased to announce that Nick Bogaty, currently Executive Director of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), will join Adobe next month to lead our digital publishing business development. Nick has demonstrated strong vision and the ability to “herd cats” in successfully guiding the IDPF, a trade group that brings together publishers, vendors, and other publishing industry stakeholders to advance technology standards and promote market development. While Nick understandably decided to seek new challenges after an almost six year stint at the helm of IDPF, his passion for promoting the broader adoption of digital publishing was clearly unabated, so I’m delighted that he’s chosen to come on board and play a key role in advancing Adobe’s contributions. Adobe remains a strong supporter of IDPF, consistent with our overall philosophy of promoting open standards and interoperability, and we are committed to helping to ensure a successful IDPF leadership transition.

August 24, 2007

Authoring EPUB from InDesign CS3

Several of our key developers, including our lead architect Peter Sorotokin, recently started a new Adobe Digital Editions blog . One of the first posts delves into best practices for authoring EPUB XML from InDesign CS3. The team plans to cover a wide variety of topics relating to the technical underpinnings of Digital Editions and various authoring workflows. Future posts I'm looking forward to include automatic conversion of DocBook XML to EPUB, and delving into the use of XSL-FO master page templates as an EPUB extension that facilitates dynamic, adaptive layout. If you have topics you'd like to see covered, suggest it in a comment on Peter's intro post.

There's a broader issue with use of our new InDesign feature that I'd like to touch on here: the tradeoffs between authoring PDF and EPUB. Many content authors have long been firmly rooted in a "WYSIWYG" mindset, and some have as a result expected EPUB to be some kind of XML version of PDF, that preserves all the composition of InDesign. That's not the case: if you want final-form fidelity, you should stick with PDF - that's what it was designed for, and it does its job very well. EPUB is designed to represent a more adaptive portable document - one that encapsulates a sequence of linear text flows ("Stories" in InDesign/InCopy lingo). Content-level styling can be applied (via CSS), final-form content can be embedded within a text flow (as SVG or Flash SWF), and hints as to page-level formatting can be applied (via our XSL-FO-based extensions to EPUB), but at the end of the day it's up to an EPUB processor to determine the proper page layout based on a user's screen size, resolution, font size preferences, etc. And different EPUB renderers are free to make different line layout decisions.

One implication of this is that "your mileage may vary" in creating EPUB from InDesign CS3. If you have a nice linear book, with InDesign stories flowed into well-designed page templates things should go well - especially if you follow the tips in Peter & Piotr's post. If you created page layouts manually in a "pasteboard" manner, then things may get a bit stickier. Again, you may choose in this case to just stick with high-fidelity PDF. Our DIgital Editions software natively supports both PDF and EPUB as first-class citizens. But if you want the benefits of adaptive layout, mobile device optimization, and increased accessiblity of using EPUB, you may wish to reconsider your authoring workflow, to more consistently utilize InDesign Story flows to pave the way for structured EPUB XML export. This is something else I hope the team will blog about in more detail down the road.

August 21, 2007

Flash (and Digital Editions) to support standards-based H.264 video

Today Adobe announced that Flash Player 9 will gain support for standards-based H.264 video , which will enable compatibility with MPEG-4, QuickTime, and 3GP mobile video content. H.264 support is coming in an imminent update "dot" release, a beta of which will be available on Adobe Labs later today.

Flash Video is of course already broadly proliferated on the Internet. But until now Flash Video has been limited to specialized codecs that have had limited adoption on mobile devices, not much integrated HW acceleration, and not a great deal of choice iin software encoding tools. Now we can have the best of both worlds: seamless end-user experiences in Flash Player, and interoperability with a wide variety of video creation tools and device and PC HW-acceleration options. This announcement is also another strong demonstration of Adobe's commitment to the open standards community.

Adobe Digital Editions, our new application for reading and managing eBooks and other digital publications, is built on an extended Flash Player 9 runtime (in effect a precursor to Adobe AIR). Digital Editions 1.0 was just released in June, but we are already hard at work on an update to, among other things, localize to a number of languages. We decided some time back to synch our update with the impending "MovieStar" Flash Player dot release - but until today couldn't disclose one of the key underlying motivations. I believe the added benefit of H.264 video support definitely makes it worth the wait. Many publishers are eager to enhance learning and entertainment experiences by adding video to eBooks and other digital publications: the ability to choose a standards-based video encoding will be a big plus, and is consistent with Digital Editions native support of open standards PDF and EPUB.

August 01, 2007

Google: a Glass-House Dweller re: Misleading Notices?

Google, Others Contest Copyright Warnings , today in the WSJ, notes a pending complaint that the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) , a trade group in which Google, Microsoft and others are members, is filing about copyright notices that, according to the CCIA, mislead users by not noting legitimate fair-use reproduction rights. What Google's role, if any, in the complaint is not entirely clear, but it certainly seems ironic that Google is being associated with this complaint, at the same time as they are putting putting highly misleading notices on scanned public domain works:

The Google notice, found as page 1 on downloadable PDFs of public domain works available via Google Book Search, "asks" users to:

Make non-commercial use of the files. We designed Google Book Search for use by individuals, and we request that you use these files for personal, non-commercial purposes...

Maintain attribution The Google “watermark” you see on each file is essential for informing people about this project and helping them find additional materials through Google Book Search. Please do not remove it.

There is clear U.S. precedent that scanning a public domain work does not create a new copyright so there seems to be absolutely zero legal basis for restricting use or forcing users to preserve inserted per-page watermarks-cum-advertisements.

In previous email-list discussions some have argued that Google is only "asking" users to not do these things. Yet putting the above in a sternly-worded "Usage Guidelines" notice (containing phrases like "Keep it Legal") certainly makes it sound like it's intended to convey to users the impression of restricted rights. And it hasn't been entirely clear whether Google is claiming contract-based usage restrictions between it and users of Google Book Search.

So Google: which is it? If I make commercial use of one of these files or remove Google's watermark advertisements am I violating a contract with Google or otherwise breaking any laws (in which case terms like "ask" and "request" are disingenuous)? Or, am I not in violation of anything legally (in which case your current notice seems at least as misleading as anything being complained about)?

Personally I hope that the latter is Google's position and that, in the spirit of "do no evil" and to avoid undermining the FTC complaint it may be backing, Google will revise their notice to make it clear that it is perfectly legal for users to make commercial use of their files and/or remove their per-page watermarks.

My position is based on the principle that what's in the public domain must stay in the public domain. That a deep-pocket corporation chooses to pay for digitization is meritorious but doesn't give that corporation the right to dictate subsequent usage. If that company is the prevalent entry gate for discovery, and so can arrange that "its" copy of a work, rather than any other digitized copy, is the most widely utilized, the potential for undue corporate intrusion into the public domain is obviously even higher.

June 19, 2007

Adobe Delivers Digital Editions 1.0

Today we announced the release of Adobe Digital Editions 1.0. Digital Editions is a lightweight consumer-focused application for acquiring, reading, and managing eBooks and other publications, and is the centerpiece of Adobe's expanded digital publishing strategy. Free download here, or better yet experience the streamlined "install and read" of a free sample eBook from our sample library.

Digital Editions has many unique characteristics. The fact that we squeezed native PDF support, Flash support, and a consumer-friendly user interface into a 3MB download ought to be enough to turn some heads. But what I'm most excited about is that Digital Editions supports the new EPUB format in addition to PDF. EPUB (aka OPS), is an open standard, a reflowable XHTML-based format, packaged in a single-file container, that I believe will do for dynamic documents what PDF has done for paginated final-form documents. It will take a little while for publishers to fully adopt EPUB, but we've provided a key enabler by supporting one-button EPUB authoring for Digital Editions as a feature of the new new InDesign CS3. With PDF for final-form content and EPUB for "liquid" content that adapts to the user's display size and preferred font size, I believe we have achieved an open standard format platform that the industry as a whole will rapidly adopt, and finally end the "Tower of eBabel" of competing proprietary formats.

And as mobile devices become more and more prevalent, and as content needs to be sliced and diced and augmented in new and different ways that don't necessarily mach up with paper-like pages, I believe EPUB has the potential to be at least as important to the future of portable documents as today's PDF.

Getting back to the product, the commercial release of Digital Editions is a huge step forward from our Adobe Labs public beta releases. It adds support for bookmarks, highlights, and text notes (stored in an open XML format to facilitate future social networkign features), multiple bookshelves in Library view, and sports a reworked user interface that improves reading navigation, TOC display and addresses a host of issues. Publisher and content distributor support has been very strong.

The Labs beta process was definitely a tremendous accelerant - enabling us to engage with customers and partners and evolve the product much faster than a traditional shrink-wrapped software development cycle. We had close to 400,000 downloads during the 9 month process: a bit more than is probably ideal to experience the "first pancake off the griddle", especially when some of them were users who hadn't necessarily made an explicit decision to use not-ready-for-prime-time beta wares, but had simply upgraded to Reader 8 and therefore needed our Digital Editions companion software to read their eBooks. Certainly it's a very different way to deliver software to make 4 public releases over an 8 month period. But overall our users have been patient with us, and as a result the 1.0 release benefits from customer-feedback-driven changes that make it, in my mind, signficantly more mature than a typical 1.0 process. We probably were a bit too ambitious in the changes we decided to make from our beta to 1.0 - but I'm really impressed that the team pulled it off.

The 1.0 release is available for Mac (PPC & Intel native) and Windows (XP, Vista, and Windows 2000). And today at the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference we are also demonstrating a desktop Linux version that will be in public beta soon. Mobile/device support is also coming, as evidenced by our announcement today that Sony wil be incorporating Digital Editions capabiliities, including EPUB and Adobe DRM support, into the Sony Reader product line.

For those publishers who require DRM capabilities, we have also debuted a new hosted service for content protection, Adobe ADEPT. More later on ADEPT and all the issues around DRM. I also want to highlight the Flex-based development of Digital Editions, which in many ways is Adobe's first AIR (aka Apollo) style application. But that will also have to wait for another post.

May 03, 2007

Publishers Seeking Tools of Change

Gilbane's Steve Paxhia writes that many publishers are experiencing "Kodak Moments".:

...changes in customer expectations that are easily as profound as those experienced by the Photography industry. They don't just want their information to be more timely and less expensive, they also want their information to concisely answer their questions and seamlessly integrate with their work flows or learning styles.

Perhaps the most significant change is the redefinition of the EDU [Economic Delivery Unit]... In the digital world, authors and publishers are potentially freed from the strictures of printing economies. Therefore, information currently found in textbooks, references, magazines and journals can be rendered as as short information objects or more comprehensive content modules. Or publishers can produce information objects or content modules that are not anticipated to ever take book form. The objects can be delivered in many ways including search engines such as Google. These new EDUs can be purchased or licenses separately or mixed and matched to create a course of instruction or a personal reference work.

Drilling down, Steve notes a stumbling block:

To many publishers, the perfectly formatted page has become almost an art form. They consider those pages to have many of the same aesthetic values that Kodak attributed to images produced via their traditional film technologies... Because books and computer screens represent quite different form factors, the value of the perfect page can actually limit rather that enhance the effective presentation of information in digital formats. ... Publishers that cling to the page metaphor are putting their futures in jeopardy.

In the digital world it's clear that the "perfect page" (and its standard representation, PDF) will still have important roles to play. For many kinds of highly composed content - children's books, elaborately inset textbooks, coffee table books - it doesn't make much sense to think about "reflowing" to different sized displays, any more than it makes sense to chop up a perfect photograph. But for many types of content, it will pay off to "keep it liquid" for improved reusability, accessibility, and mobile readability. That's why Adobe is promoting the new IDPF OPS reflow-centric XML format as a complement to PDF . We're supporting OPS in our new Digital Editions client software and InDesign CS3 publishing tools.

Next month O'Reilly Conferences is holding a new conference on publishing technology: Tools of Change, June 18-20 in San Jose, California. This should be a great venue for exchanging ideas about these tremendous business and technology challenges facing the publishing industry - hosted by an organization that has been at the head of the pack on everything from eBooks to XML content repositories to Web 2.0. Adobe is one of the sponsors of TOC and our CEO Bruce Chizen is speaking. You can look forward to seeing some exciting new stuff from us (after all, it's taking place in our back yard). So if you are involved in charting the future of publishing, as a publisher or vendor, I hope you will consider joining Tim O'Reilly and team at TOC. Early bird registration ends Monday 5/8, so "act now, operators are standing by".

March 12, 2007

Ad Age: Print is Dead (Not)

Interesting article -"Is Print Dead? Not on Your (Second) Life" in Advertising Age. In the process of arguing for the future viability of print, author Robin Steinberg acknowledges the increasingly critical role of digital content. It's no longer a "print industry", so "Is Print Dead?" is really the wrong question, even though the answer is a resounding "No". Via (ironically) the Print Is Dead blog and Peter Brantley.