Positioned between full-fledged open source software, where everything is public and developed by a participatory process, and totally proprietary software, where nothing is public and development is strictly in-house, are open standards for software technologies. Open standards are public specifications for software functionality which are usually developed or at least refined through a participatory process, for example by creating a temporary working group to draft them.
I’ve chosen the Open EBook Standard, or OEB, as an example of an open standard because it’s familiar to me as an ebook publisher.
The Open EBook Standard is a document preparation standard for electronic books (“ebooks”) developed over a period of about a year beginning in 1998 by an authoring group which included representatives of large and small software companies, two participants from a major university, one from an established publisher, one from a free ebook project, and also a facilitator from the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the U.S. Department of Commerce. What’s significant here is that from the outset an effort was made to draw on a number of groups for input into the standard – it’s not the creation of a single inspired human mind.
Version 1.0 of the standard was released in late 1999 and version 1.01 in mid-2001. Notable industry contributors at one stage or another of the process included Microsoft, SoftBook, Nuvomedia, OverDrive, Gemstar, Nokia, the Library of Congress, and Adobe. The companies contributing to this effort were motivated to collaborate on a standard by a shared assessment that as portable computing devices became cheaper and more ubiquitous, ebooks represented a major business opportunity.
However, to realize this opportunity, major traditional publishers had to be persuaded to begin releasing titles in electronic as well as print formats. The members of this consortium agreed that publishers would be more amenable to investing time and effort in preparing electronic editions if a single comprehensive document preparation format had been adopted as an industry standard. One de facto standard called DocBook was already in widespread use, but it was based on Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), which was obsolescent, and was extremely complex because it was intended for the publication of technical books such as computer programming references. It was overkill for novels, biographies, and historical accounts.
The OEB standard was thus a major contribution in that its specifications encompassed everything a publisher needed to prepare an electronic fiction or nonfiction book that will be comparable or superior to a print book. Thus, it allows (in theory if not in practice, as we shall see in a moment) a publisher to prepare a single master electronic edition of a book which can then be released in a number of proprietary DRM-protected formats (see below). However, since it’s a document preparation standard, not a document distribution standard, the OEB has nothing to do with interoperability – the ability to read one ebook with different reader applications – from an end-user standpoint.
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DRM vs. TPM Although ebooks protected against unauthorized duplication are in general referred to as “DRM-protected,” a commentator using the enigmatic name “Networker” who contributes frequently to the Yahoo! group TeBC (The eBook Community) has argued that it’s more accurate to use “TPM” (Technical Protection Measures) than “DRM” (Digital Rights Management) in this case, since the protection measures actually have little to do with rights per se and can prevent legally permitted fair use. |
As is typical of open standards, the OEB was forward-looking at the time it was proposed because it was based on XML, which was just beginning to emerge as a software technology. Microsoft, not known for embracing open source software in general, has been much more amenable to open standards, and was one of the major participants in the authoring group.
The final product of the authoring group was a specification (a detailed descriptive document released, interestingly, in Adobe’s PDF format, rather than the XML or XHTML adopted by the specification itself), an extensive test suite to permit assessment of conformity of specific implementations to the overall standard, and a brief example ebook in OEB format for reference purposes. Thus the standard provided not merely a document but also a way to validate the output of code written to implement it. As a standard, it does not include any source code and the implementation is left entirely to its individual adopters, allowing them to compete freely in implementing it reliably, efficiently, and pleasingly for end users.
Despite the expertise the members of the authoring group brought to their task and the theoretical advantages of the OEB, the end result is not as tidy for publishers as one would expect. For example, vendors of different ebook publishing software applications for specific proprietary distribution formats adopted different conventions for specifying page breaks, crucial elements in creating a pleasing document layout.
The Mobipocket Publisher ebook creation application used the HTML horizontal rule (<HR>) and heading level 1 (<H1>) tags to generate page breaks automatically, while the competing Gemstar eBook Publisher application recommended using <span class="pagebreak"></span> with “pagebreak“ defined as “page-break-before:always“ in a cascading style sheet and OverDrive ReaderWorks used the style="page-break-before:always” attribute within a <P> tag.
And despite its advantages the OEB was never adopted by one major ebook distributor, Palm Digital Media (now eReader.com), which instead developed its own document preparation format, Palm Markup Language, or PML.
Bottom line: As a publisher, I must presently prepare three different editions of my ebook titles – two OEB variants (one for Microsoft Reader, the other for Mobipocket) and one PML version. Fortunately I’ve been able to automate this process to a considerable degree by first preparing a master OEB version and then generating the three editions with their slight but critical differences from the master.
By now, most major print publishers have invested in integrating automated production of one or more ebook formats of their titles into their workflow processes. Commercial software products such as the Rosetta engine have also been developed to automate translation of a title into a wide variety of ebook formats.
Efforts are now underway to create an open document distribution standard for the ebook industry. One called OEBPS, or Open EBook Publication Structure, has been slow in formulation and a competing standard called OpenReader is further along in development. However, as is common in open source culture, there is agreement that two standards would be confusing, so an effort to reconcile the two is underway. If that’s unsuccessful, then the OpenReader standard will probably be finalized and released in the near future.