[Web4lib] More on the Open Content Alliance

[Karen Coyle]

There have been some reasonably well-done studies on what makes for a 
usable e-book. Usability for e-books essentially means an electronic 
book that you would read end-to-end the way you would a paper book, not 
just some text where you look up a line or a paragraph so that you can 
fill in a quote in your term paper. One of the main things that e-books 
need is to be portable -- you have to be able to take them off the 
computer screen and move them to another device. It's not that the 
computer screen is so bad in these days of LCDs, but that people don't 
want to sit at a desk to read. So it has to be downloadable, offline. 
Then people want all of the "affordances" of real books: to dog-ear 
pages, leave bookmarks, make annotations, to have stable page numbers 
that can be cited. The real carrot is that e-books can have advantages 
over paper books -- searching, the ability to have them read outloud 
(although with a computerized voice), the ability to carry ten or twenty 
of them in a palm-sized device, etc.

Although Project Gutenberg is very well-meaning, their books lack most 
of the requirements for usability, which is unfortunate. Of course, so 
does the format of Kahle's OCA book. I found each page to be highly 
readable, more so than most HTML pages, but I would never read an entire 
book using that software. Both Adobe and Microsoft have produced decent 
e-book software, but they are proprietary formats. I would love to see 
well-done, full-fledged, open source e-book software developed so that 
we could encourage the reading of full-length electronic texts. The 
DAISY format standard is a beginning, but I have yet to encounter a good 
reader for that format. Creating a good reader would be a great OCA 
project. Much of the information needed to do so already exists in 
standards and studies.
kc


Drew, Bill wrote:

>I'm also curious as to why Project Gutenberg is not a part of the Open
>Content Alliance.  Pockets not deep enough?  It already has the content
>in a very readable and useful form, but then it doesn't look like a
>"real" book and the Alliance seems hung up on looks instead of content.
>Stuck on the package and not the content again.
>
>Wilfred (Bill) Drew
>E-mail: mailto:drewwe at morrisville.edu
>AOL Instant Messenger:BillDrew4 
> 
>
>  
>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org 
>>[mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Jennifer Heise
>>Sent: Thursday, October 27, 2005 11:26 AM
>>To: Roy Tennant
>>Cc: Web4Lib
>>Subject: Re: [Web4lib] More on the Open Content Alliance
>>
>>Huh? 'In many cases you have choices'?
>>You're darn right it isn't Google Library-- the desire to do 
>>something cool
>>and splashy instead of being easy to read, which haunts 
>>librarianship, has
>>clearly run amuck there. I don't care if it's 'quite 
>>beautiful', 
>>    
>>
>_______________________________________________
>Web4lib mailing list
>Web4lib at webjunction.org
>http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/
>
>
>  
>

-- 
-----------------------------------
Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle at kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
------------------------------------