Eh, I don’t think I’m going to answer the latest Rothman ranting. I agree with much of it, strongly STRONGLY disagree with the conspiracy-theory aspects (why attribute to conspiracy what is simpler to explain as incompetence?), and am still waiting (with breath I dare not bate lest I suffocate myself) to see anything practical come of it.
I’m more interested in the question of what technological standards ebooks really need, over and above what already exists or can be forecasted to exist shortly. I find that my thoughts boil down to the question, “How is an ebook different from a website?”
To narrow it even further, I am considering questions of text artisanry only—how ebooks need to be constructed and how ebook readers need to make those constructions work. I don’t intend to waste brainspace on DRM. I can make a perfectly happy life for myself figuring out how to best deal with the ebooks people want us to have; I’d rather not cater to paranoia and greed.
So here’s a starter: Ebooks, like their print counterparts, are persistent in a way that websites can, but need not, be.
This has quite a few implications. One: a given ebook “edition” needs a unique and persistent identifier. Which leaves us wondering what an “edition” is. If HappyBook and BouncyBook build ebooks from the same source, are they the same edition? The answer heretofore has been “no,” but I personally think that’s a dreadful answer. They’re no more different than the VHS and DVD versions of the same movie—possibly less, given all the extras that DVDs carry these days. And in my local library’s OPAC, that’s “format” information, no more.
So what separates one electronic edition of a book from another, if not format? Well, all right, what separates one paper edition from another? My answer (which may not square with anyone else’s): publisher, changed content, and page numbers. Why page numbers? For citation purposes, of course.
Ah. But ebooks don’t have page numbers. The first generation of OEB-based readers allowed font size change on the fly, which was terrific for folks needing large print, but hell on anyone trying to cite a section.
So that’s another sine qua non, to my mind. We have to solve the citation problem. And then pagination becomes irrelevant, format (defined as “end-user format,” and before you think I’m advocating a repeat of the Format Wars, consider that Braille and speak-aloud versions can come from the same XML source that becomes the kind of ebook we sighted folk are more familiar with) becomes irrelevant. All that matters, one edition to another, is whether the content or the publisher has changed, which is how things ought to be.
The only way the identifier and citation problems get solved is with standards. I think existing or in-progress standards can tackle identifiers, myself—but the citation problem is (to my mind) technological. Every format for a given edition of an ebook has to be able to spit out the same citation for a given spot in that ebook, and by the same token has to find the same spot in that ebook given the same citation.
XPointer? Maybe, maybe… but something, and it’ll take a standards body to work out the something.
What else? Stay tuned. I have some more ideas on this score.
