E-books and e-publishing by Samuel Vaknin (summer reading list txt) 📖

and Harper Collins) have

developed to converting their hitherto inertial backlists into

e-books. Gone are the days when e-books were perceived as

merely a novel form of packaging. Publishers understood the

cash potential this new distribution channel offers and the

value added to stale print tomes in the conversion process.

This epiphany is especially manifest in education and textbook

publishing.

Then there is the maturation of industry standards, readers

and audiences. Both the supply side (title lists) and the

demand side (readership) have increased. Giants like Microsoft

have successfully entered the fray with new e-book reader

applications, clearer fonts, and massive marketing. Retailers

- such as Barnes and Noble - opened their gates to e-books. A

host of independent publishers make good use of the

negligible-cost distribution channel that the Internet is.

Competition and positioning are already fierce - a good sign.

The Internet used to be an English, affluent middle-class,

white collar, male phenomenon. It has long lost these

attributes. The digital divides that opened up with the early

adoption of the Net by academe and business - are narrowing.

Already there are more women than men users and English is the

language of less than half of all web sites. The wireless Net

will grant developing countries the chance to catch up.

Astute entrepreneurs are bound to take advantage of the

business-friendly profile of the manpower and investment-hungry governments of some developing countries. It is not

uncommon to find a mastery of English, a college degree in the

sciences, readiness to work outlandish hours at a fraction of

wages in Germany or the USA - all combined in one employee in

these deprived countries. India has sprouted a whole industry

based on these competitive endowments.

Here is how Steve Potash, OverDrive’s CEO, explains his daring

move in OverDrive’s press release dated May 22, 2001:

“Everyone we are partnering with in the US and worldwide has

been very excited and delighted by the tremendous success and

quality of eBook production from OverDrive Jamaica. Jamaica

has tremendous untapped talent in its young people. Jamaica is

the largest English-speaking nation in the Caribbean and their

educational and technical programs provide us with a wealth of

quality candidates for careers in electronic publishing. We

could not have had this success without the support and

responsiveness of the Jamaican government and its agencies. At

every stage the agencies assisted us in opening our technology

centre and staffing it with trained and competent eBook

professionals. OverDrive Jamaica will be pioneering many of

the advances for extending books, reference materials,

textbooks, literature and journals into new digital channels -

and will shortly become the foremost centre for eBook

automation serving both US and international markets”.

Druanne Martin, OverDrive’s Director of publishing services

elaborates:

““With Jamaica and Cleveland, Ohio sharing the same time zone

(EST), we have our US and Jamaican production teams in sync.

Jamaica provides a beautiful and warm climate, literally, for

us to build long-term partnerships and to invite our

publishing and content clients to come and visit their books

in production”.

The Jamaican Minister of Industry, Commerce and Technology,

the Hon. Phillip Paulwell reciprocates:

“We are proud that OverDrive has selected Jamaica to extend

its leadership in eBook technology. OverDrive is benefiting

from the investments Jamaica has made in developing the needed

infrastructure for IT companies to locate and build skilled

workforces here.”

There is nothing new in outsourcing back office work

(insurance claims processing, air ticket reservations, medical

records maintenance) to third world countries, such as (the

notable example) India. Research and Development is routinely

farmed out to aspiring first world countries such as Israel

and Ireland. But OverDrive’s Jamaican facility is an example

of something more sophisticated and more durable. Western

firms are discovering the immense pools of skills, talent,

innovation, and top notch scientific and other education often

offered even by the poorest of nations. These multinationals

entrust the locals now with more than keyboarding and

responding to customer queries using fake names. The Jamaican

venture is a business partnership. In a way, it is a topsy-turvy world. Digital animation is produced in India and

consumed in the States. The low compensation of scientists

attracts the technology and R&D arms of the likes of General

Electric to Asia and Intel to Israel. In other words, there

are budding signs of a reversing brain drain - from West to

East.

E-publishing is at the forefront of software engineering, e-consumerism, intellectual property technologies, payment

systems, conversion applications, the mobile Internet, and,

basically, every important trend in network and computing and

digital content. Its migration to warmer and cheaper climates

may be inevitable. OverDrive sounds happy enough.

 

An Ambarrassment of Riches

By: Sam Vaknin

 

http://www.doi.org/

 

The Internet is too rich. Even powerful and sophisticated

search engines, such as Google, return a lot of trash, dead

ends, and Error 404’s in response to the most well-defined

query, Boolean operators and all. Directories created by human

editors - such as Yahoo! or the Open Directory Project - are

often overwhelmed by the amount of material out there. Like

the legendary blob, the Internet is clearly out of

classificatory control. Some web sites - like Suite101 - have

introduced the old and tried Dewey subject classification

system successfully used in non-virtual libraries for more

than a century. Books - both print and electronic - (actually,

their publishers) get assigned an ISBN (International Standard

Book Number) by national agencies. Periodical publications

(magazines, newsletters, bulletins) sport an ISSN

(International Serial Standard Number). National libraries

dole out CIP’s (Cataloguing in Publication numbers), which

help lesser outfits to catalogue the book upon arrival. But

the emergence of new book formats, independent publishing, and

self publishing has strained this already creaking system to

its limits. In short: the whole thing is fast developing into

an awful mess.

Resolution is one solution.

Resolution is the linking of identifiers to content. An

identifier can be a word, or a phrase. RealNames implemented

this approach and its proprietary software is now incorporated

in most browsers. The user types a word, brand name, phrase,

or code, and gets re-directed to a web site with the

appropriate content. The only snag: RealNames identifiers are

for sale. Thus, its identifiers are not guaranteed to lead to

the best, only, or relevant resource. Similar systems are

available in many languages. Nexet, for example, provides such

a resolution service in Hebrew.

The Association of American Publishers (APA) has an Enabling

Technologies Committee. Fittingly, at the Frankfurt Book Fair

of 1997, it announced the DOI (Digital Object Identifier)

initiative. An International DOI Foundation (IDF) was set up

and invited all publishers - American and non-American alike -

to apply for a unique DOI prefix. DOI is actually a private

case of a larger system of “handles” developed by the CNRI

(Corporation for National Research Initiatives). Their “Handle

Resolver” is a browser plug-in software, which re-directs

their handles to URL’s or other pieces of data, or content.

Without the Resolver, typing in the handle simply directs the

user to a few proxy servers, which “understand” the handle

protocols.

 

The interesting (and new) feature of the system is its ability

to resolve to MULTIPLE locations (URL’s, or data, or content).

The same identifier can resolve to a Universe of inter-related

information (effectively, to a mini-library). The content thus

resolved need not be limited to text. Multiple resolution

works with audio, images, and even video.

The IDF’s press release is worth some extensive quoting:

“Imagine you’re the manager of an Internet company reading a

story online in the “Wall Street Journal” written by Stacey E.

Bressler, a co-author of Communities of Commerce, and at the

end of the story there is a link to purchase options for the

book.

Now imagine you are an online retailer, a syndicator or a

reporter for an online news service and you are reading a

review in “Publishers Weekly” about Communities of Commerce

and you run across a link to related resources.

And imagine you are in Buenos Aires, and in an online

publication you encounter a link to “D-Lib Magazine”, an

electronic journal produced in Washington, D.C. which offers

you locale-specific choices for downloading an article.

The above examples demonstrate how multiple resolution can

present you with a list of links from within an electronic

document or page. The links beneath the labels - URLs and

email addresses - would all be stored in the DOI System, and

multiple resolution means any or all of those links can be

displayed for you to select from in one menu. Any combination

of links to related resources can be included in these menus.

Capable of providing much richer experiences then single

resolution to a URL, Multiple Resolution operates on the

premise that content, not its location, is identified. In

other words, where content and related resources reside is

secondary information. Multiple Resolution enables content

owners and distributors to identify their intellectual

property with bound collections of related resources at a

hyperlink’s point of departure, instead of requiring a user to

leave the page to go to a new location for further

information.

A content owner controls and manages all the related resources

in each of these menus and can determine which information is

accessible to each business partner within the supply chain.

When an administrator changes any facet of this information,

the change is simultaneous on all internal networks and the

Internet. A DOI is a permanent identifier, analogous to a

telephone number for life, so tomorrow and years from now a

user can locate the product and related resources wherever

they may have been moved or archived to.”

The IDF provides a limited, text-only, online demonstration.

When sweeping with the cursor over a linked item, a pop-down

menu of options is presented. These options are pre-defined

and customized by the content creators and owners. In the

first example above (book purchase options) the DOI resolves

to retail outlets (categorized by book formats), information

about the title and the author, digital rights management

information (permissions), and more. The DOI server generates

this information in “real time”, “on the fly”. But it is the

author, or (more often) the publisher that choose the

information, its modes of presentation, selections, and

marketing and sales data. The ingenuity is in the fact that

the DOI server’s files and records can be updated, replaced,

or deleted. It does not affect the resolution path - only the

content resolved to.

Which brings us to e-publishing.

The DOI Foundation has unveiled the DOI-EB (EB stands for ebooks) Initiative in the Book Expo America Show 2001, to, in

their words:

“Determine requirements with respect to the application of

unique identifiers to eBooks

Develop proofs-of-concept for the use of DOIs with eBooks

Develop technical demonstrations, possibly including a

prototype eBook Registration Agency.”

It is backed by a few major publishers, such as McGraw-Hill,

Random House, Pearson, and Wiley.

This ostensibly modest agenda conceals a revolutionary and

ambitious attempt to unambiguously identify the origin of

digital content (in this case, e-books) and link a universe of

information to each and every ID number. Aware of competing

efforts underway, the DOI Foundation is actively courting the

likes of “indecs” (Interoperability of Data in E-Commerce

System) and OeBF (Open e-Book). Companies ,like Enpia Systems

of South Korea (a DOI Registration Agency), have already

implemented a DOI-cum-indecs system. On November 2000, the

APA’s (American Publishers’ Association) Open E-book

Publishing Standards Initiative has recommended to use DOI as

the primary identification system for e-books’ metadata. The

MPEG (Motion Pictures Experts Group) is said to be considering

DOI seriously in its efforts to come up with numbering and

metadata standards for digital videos. A DOI can be expressed

as a URN (Universal Resource Name - IETF’s syntax for generic

resources) and is compatible with OpenURL (a syntax for

embedding parameters such as identifiers and metadata in

links). Shortly, a “Namespace Dictionary” is to be published.

It will encompass 800 metadata elements and will tackle ebooks, journals, audio,