Caveat Lector

The question becomes, then, whether the OEBF is a suitable venue for continuing development of electronic-book specifications.

Frankly? No.

Shortly after I started work at OverDrive, I heard Steve speak at an OEBF plenary. His attitude toward the OEBPS was that the OEBF had already done the standards thing, wrung what there was to wring from it—and it was time to Move On to more fun and exciting things. Public relations, mostly. And trade-org stuff, whatever it is that trade orgs do (I’ve never been sure).

Hardly coincidence that PubStruct withered inside the next year. And from respect for the principals involved (some of them, at least), that’s all I’m going to say about that.

I’m dead sure the OEBF can’t get back the people it lost over that year. That isn’t entirely because of bad memories, either; part of it is that major contributors to the first effort have had their employers back off on the whole ebook concept, and thus can’t get leeway to participate any longer. (I am thinking particularly of Microsoft and Xerox PAL here; the demise of Gemstar matters quite a bit also.) The original technical talent pool has been quite thoroughly muddied.

Nor do I think the OEBF can put together another one. Ebooks are a hard sell to technical talent these days. About the only other thing that would attract more technical talent is existing technical talent, which they just don’t have any longer. So even if they realize their mistake, I seriously doubt they can correct it at this late date.

Myself, I think the OEBF is moribund, not worth the energy that Mr. Rothman is expending on it. It’s easy to be angry at them for some of the chances they threw away. I used to be pretty ticked off myself. Better, however, we should focus on the future—which is brighter than one might think.

I see three bright spots in e-text today. With any luck at all, they’ll converge to finish the job that PubStruct started. On the technical side, there’s James Clark and Murata Makoto, who are tackling the nasty namespace-combination issues that PubStruct was trying (rather fruitlessly) to find a metadata solution to. There is also Relax NG, which solves the grotesque problems PubStruct was having with DTDs. (Well, most of them. There’s still the warty old HTML entity set. Sigh.)

On the book side, there’s the accessibility people, and the nice state legislators who are starting to require that textbook publishers use e-text and electronic production methods to make their wares accessible for the visually-impaired. I don’t have the whole story here—but it sure does bear watching. If we can get textbooks, which are some of the hardest book-production jobs known to man, made into markup, we can bloody well do anything.

And on the social side—the demand side—there’s open-access scholarship. I remember my dad the professor’s article file—I helped fill it when I was a youngster. Three big unwieldy file cabinets, organized by author last name and date—and since most papers had multiple authors, Dad couldn’t ever find an article he wanted anyway. Give academia a wireless gadget with a good display that finds this stuff, downloads it, and organizes it for fast retrieval and perusal, and they’ll stampede a path to the ebook door. I mean, really, it just isn’t that hard to beat the current state of e-reserves (which are flourishing mightily).

I’m actually of the opinion that former ebookers who can’t climb on one of the above-mentioned bandwagons (and if they can, they should, by all means) should sit back and wait. Wait. Wait and see. Interesting times coming.