Ebooks Elite or Obsolete

Ebooks: Elite or Obsolete?

The first electronic
books?!

Tip of the hat to Lettie B!

Tompson / DLRT / Mar06 1


Presentation for the USC
Digital Library Roundtable
March 24, 2006
Sara Tompson, S&E Library


What ARE ebooks? Opinions vary! I will:
• Briefly cover the history of device-oriented texts,
and then…
• Move toward fulltext online books, including the
thousands to which we subscribe at USC, with…
• A discussion of some standards & metadata


Hypertext pioneer Andries Van Dam1 (Brown
University, etc.) coined “electronic book” >20 yrs ago.
But definitions vary. Is it:
Content? -- Project Gutenberg and so on
Format? -- Devices/appliances
1 Ardito, Stephanie. “Electronic Books: To ‘E’ or not to ‘E’;
that is the question.” Searcher 8:4 (April 2000), pp. 28-38.


Ebook History/Background
DEVICES/APPLIANCES – Xerox PARC into:
• Early vision – Alan Kay’s “Dynabook”1- PC
prototype
• XLibris reader2 – closer to a tablet PC
1Press,
Larry. “Personal computing: From p-books to e-books.”
Communications of the ACM 43:5 (2000), Pages 17-21.
2Schlitt, Bill N., et al. “As We May Read: The Reading Appliance
Revolution.” IEEE Computer 32: 1 (Jan. 1999), pp. 65-73 .



Dynabook
XLibris


• ReadUp3 “widget” for UpLib
3 Janssen, William C. “ReadUp: A Widget for Reading.” PARC
Technical Report TR-05-3. (April 2005) http://www2.parc.com/
isl/members/janssen/pubs/TR-05-3.pdf


Other recent devices:
• Rocket Book, reconstituted by eBookwise – see
http://www.ebookwise.com
• Cybook – see http://www.bookeen.com/
• Sony Librie -> Portable Reader System PRS-500
– due out later in 2006


Publishers Report Increases in eBook Revenue
and Units Sold in Q2 '05 [?!]
New York, NY – Friday, March 3, 2006 – eBook publishers
reported increases in revenue and unit sales over the same
quarter the previous year (Q2 2004) with a 36% increase in
eBook units sold and a 69% increase in eBook revenues.
Also, publishers reported a 24% increase in titles published
over Q2 2004.”
http://www.idpf.org/doc_library/statistics/Q22005.htm


Ebooks: Formats

Online books readable from browsers viable
for libraries
• Especially academic
• Especially for reference works -- read differently
than fiction


Ebooks: Formats
Web Ebook Pros and Cons for Libraries
• Barely “theftable”
• Multiple simultaneous users
• Well suited to reference – looking up/verifying
simple data, not extensive reading
• High tech, low touch, easy maintenance


Ebooks: Formats
Web Ebook Pros and Cons for Libraries
• Some readers/plug-ins kludgy
• Browsability still not as easy online
• Typically do not allow: OpenURL linking
Z39.50 searching
XML gateways
PDA downloads


Ebooks at USC

• eBrary™
http://was.usc.edu/eresources/isd/gateways/2827.php

• Safari Tech Books ™
• netlibrary ™


USC Ebooks: ebrary

“We currently provide eBook technologies and
services to more than 900 customers in 100 different
countries, representing 5.5 million end users. ebrary’s
partners include more than 220 of the world’s leading
publishers.”
ebrary® is privately held, headquartered in Palo Alto,
CA.
http://www.ebrary.com/corp/about.htm


USC Ebooks: ebrary
Founded in 1999 by:
•Christopher Warnock, an Adobe Systems Engineer; also
worked w/ university presses on electronic workflow
implementations, and Attorney Kevin Sayar who has
worked with high tech firms.
Have Library Content and Technology Advisory Boards,
including:
Rick Burke of SCELC (Content) and
Marianne Afifi (Technology)


USC Ebooks:

ebrary® Dynamic Content Platform (DCP)™ --
hosted content delivery service.
DCP supports most PDF file types (rasterized,
normal, web, etc.).
Indexed, etc. to become “highly interactive
databases” Convert into their “Exchange Data
Format ™”

USC Ebooks: ebrary

Works with: “Netscape Communicator 4.77 or
7.x, Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.x or newer,
Firefox 1.0.4 or newer (with the latest ebrary
Reader), Mozilla 1.7 or newer, Mac OS X, or
Mac OS 9.1 or newer…”
Requires a browser plugin


USC Ebooks: ebrary
Just a few features:
InfoTools powerful, interesting links for Define
[Merriam-Webster.com or OED subscription,
Explain [Encyclopedia Britannica], Translate
[BabelFish] Who [Biography.com]
APA, MLA, other citation formats
MARC records; also working on federated
OPAC searches

USC Ebooks:

“SLA has contracted with ebrary… to host, distribute, and
archive a full-text database of SLA serials and other
publications. Information Outlook will be available
through ebrary's interactive platform. ….In the near future,
ebrary will also scan SLA's journal Special Libraries, from
its first issue in January 1910 to 1996”
Information Outlook 8:4, April 2004


USC Ebooks:
For Immediate Release January 20, 2004
PALO ALTO, Calf. -- American Library Association (ALA)
members will soon have online access to a fully
searchable, digital database of American Libraries
(www.ala.org/alonline/), ALA's leading magazine for the
library profession, distributed monthly to more than
64,000 individuals worldwide.
ALA today announced that it has chosen ebrary(r)
(www.ebrary.com), ….


USC Ebooks:
Founded in 2001 by O'Reilly & Associates and The
Pearson Technology Group to: “Take the best IT books
from the best authors and publishers. Put them into an
online, searchable database.”
2002: Partnered with ProQuest for academic and
government subscriptions
2003: Partnered with Thomson Netg for business
training subscriptions
http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com/

USC Ebooks:

“Safari works with HTML 4.0-compliant browsers with
cookies, JavaScript and pop-ups enabled.”
The Proquest meta help site has many fixes for many
browsers, including Linux, some issues with the Mac
Safari (!) browser, etc.
http://proquest.com/techsupport/prodfaq/safari_pd.shtml


USC Ebooks:

• Category browse
• Direct URLS
• RSS feed for new books


USC Ebooks:

• Early player: founded in 19981
• OCLC acquired in 20012
• Part of their “econtent division”
1 “New & noteworthy.” Library Hi Tech News 17:3 (2000), p. 28
2“OCLC offers to purchase assets on netlibrary.” Information Intelligence
Online Libraries and Microcomputers19:12 (Dec 2001), pp. 6-7.


USC Ebooks:

•Internet Explorer 5.5+
•Netscape 6.2+
•Mozilla 1.1+
•Firefox 1.0+
•Opera 7.0+ http://www.netlibrary.com/Help/Default.asp
x?Page=HardwareSoftwareTips


USC Ebooks:

•Adobe Acrobat Reader as plugin for most
ebooks
• LizardTech’s DjVu Browser Plug-in some

http://www.netlibrary.com/Help/Default.asp
x?Page=HardwareSoftwareTips


USC Ebooks:

Pricing still linked to print – “100% of print plus
a hefty premium for e-access”1
Arts & Humanities [unstated] focus; some links
w/ Project Gutenberg texts
USC has had for over 5 years
1 L. Sipe via email.


USC Ebooks:
CJK options
“Checkout” system with limits [e.g. 10
audiobooks; none in our current sub]
American Heritage Dictionary “embedded”
Free “ebook of the month”

Ebooks: Standards

The International Digital Publishing Forum
(IDPF), formerly the Open eBook Forum
(OeBF), is the trade and standards
association for the digital publishing industry:
http://www.idpf.org/


Ebooks: Standards

IDPF promulgates the Open Ebook Publication
Structure consensus specification, see:
http://www.idpf.org/oebps/oebps1.2/download/oeb12.pdf
OEBPS 1.0 provided document authors with a convenient
“Basic” document vocabulary that all OEB Reading
Systems must recognize. This vocabulary was selectively
drawn from the HTML 4.01 tagset, essentially conforming
to XHTML 1.0 Transitional.


Ebooks: Standards

Now up to Spec version 1.2, which continues
support for a “Basic” document vocabulary which
all OEBPS 1.2 Reading Systems must recognize.
“The Basic OEBPS 1.2 Document vocabulary is a
pure subset of XHTML 1.1.”


Ebooks: Standards

Four common attributes that may be applied to
nearly all the elements in the Basic OEBPS
Document vocabulary: xml:lang and the [Core]
attributes id, class, and title.
There are certain usage restrictions, and Reading
System conformance issues, but generally the
specification is XHTML 1.1 compliant.


Ebooks: Standards

…


Ebooks: New types?

Garmin iQue 3600a®:
• Aviation GPS and auto GPS
• Checklists
• Personal organizer, etc.


Ebooks: New types?

Podcasting! Descendant of:
Radio dramas, serials
• Books on tape, etc.
• Back to the original
definition question!


Ebooks: Some see as ubiquitous…

Taiga Provocative Statements:
#10. “e-books and e-book readers will be
ubiquitous. Standards will have magically made
this possible. Hand helds will be ubiquitous and
library resources will need to be accessible to
these devices to meet user needs.”
http://www.taigaforum.org/about.html


But I think we’re not there yet…

“The Paperless Book” by James M. Bryant (M),
Analog Devices. IEE Review (Nov. 1995), pp.
245-247):
“However, the essential feature of any practical
electronic book is that I should be able to read
it comfortably in bed.”



Sara R. Tompson, MS
Science & Engineering Team Leader
213.740.8700 * fax 213.740.0558 * sarat@usc.edu

Or: http://www.usc.edu/isd/libraries/teams/science/



THANK YOU!!


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