Alan Quatermain

The Tumblog of one Jim Dovey, iOS Software Chief Architect at Kobo in Toronto, Ontario.
He Twitters, he has an , and can occasionally be found on LinkedIn or Facebook.
If you have a query, you can ask it here.

This blog contains personal opinions, and is not endorsed by any company.

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Readium Open Source Initiative Launched to Accelerate Adoption of EPUB 3 | International Digital Publishing Forum

So here’s the Big News to which I’d earlier alluded. The IDPF has got together a who’s-who of people and companies in the eBook world to work on an open-source implementation of a reference ePub3 reading system and container library. And of course Kobo is putting a ton of weight behind it. Also, me: I’m going to be working on this project full-time here very shortly.

Looking through the project’s goals, you’ll see a good amount of overlap with the goals I’d previously stated for the ePub Author project. The core aims are all there:

  • A browser of ‘ePub3-flavoured HTML’ content.
  • A library encapsulating the correct parsing and generation of all forms of structured content described in the ePub3 standard.
  • Best-in-class support for non-Roman scripts, particularly vertically-flowing ones.
  • No limits on its use as the core of a larger project, even commercial ones.
  • Lots of industry know-how being funnelled into a single output.

So yeah: I’m rather excited about this one. Expect to hear more from me as it all progresses.

Now I’ll just go back to writing ePub3 structured content handling code…

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baileygenine:


  People who don’t suffer from depression, won’t understand it, I know I’ve said that a
  few times, but remember that. (And I don’t say “suffer” lightly, it is suffering. Your
  whole body hurts, your brain doesn’t work, you’re tired until you try to sleep and then
  you’re wide awake. You want to laugh, but instead all you can do is cry. You feel like
  crying and you just get angry, so angry, angry because there is nothing you can do to
  make yourself feel normal. You do something you absolutely love and you start to feel
  good and then you wonder why you feel good, you shouldn’t feel good, this isn’t right,
  you get anxious, you get nauseous, and you cry.)


This.

The effect depression has on me is similar, although it usually manifests in supreme lethargy. That then leads into an inability to concentrate or perform serious tasks, which means that getting worried about tasks and deadlines often leads to an evil soul-sucking downward spiral of doom and gloom.

Many thanks to Bailey for putting this into words.

baileygenine:

People who don’t suffer from depression, won’t understand it, I know I’ve said that a few times, but remember that. (And I don’t say “suffer” lightly, it is suffering. Your whole body hurts, your brain doesn’t work, you’re tired until you try to sleep and then you’re wide awake. You want to laugh, but instead all you can do is cry. You feel like crying and you just get angry, so angry, angry because there is nothing you can do to make yourself feel normal. You do something you absolutely love and you start to feel good and then you wonder why you feel good, you shouldn’t feel good, this isn’t right, you get anxious, you get nauseous, and you cry.)

This.

The effect depression has on me is similar, although it usually manifests in supreme lethargy. That then leads into an inability to concentrate or perform serious tasks, which means that getting worried about tasks and deadlines often leads to an evil soul-sucking downward spiral of doom and gloom.

Many thanks to Bailey for putting this into words.

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“Downmarket Genre Fiction” is it?

So the astute Mr. Gemmell earlier today made note of a rather elitist-sounding article over at paidContent:UK. The author of that piece rather laments the fact that eBook consumption is led by ‘genre fiction’. You know— everything that most people read; something — *shudder* — classifiable. Science fiction. Romance. Crime. Horror. Fantasy. Historical.

So, is it just me, or does that sound an awful lot like regular books? What else could we call them……… Ah yes— stories.

This all smacks of the same sort of book-snobbery we see in some literary awards’ shortlists, or in programmes about books on the BBC. This has prompted a number of authors to call out the organizers and producers of such fare for their low view of so-called ‘genre fiction’. In March 2011, author Stephen Hunt wrote on his blog:

In my world there is only one genre permitted access to the oxygen of publicity in the mainstream media, and that genre is contemporary fiction. It is also called literary fiction by its supporters, just to underscore the point that anything that isn’t written in their genre can never be classed as literature or improving or worthy.

The end result of all this snobbery, he points out, is the loss of the joy of reading in the youth of today. In amidst the many other ways of finding entertainment, the elevation of ‘contemporary fiction’ as the only thing worth reading has turned off many of our youth from reading altogether:

And that conflict, dear reader, between what we read and what is actually covered by the media has sadly begot a much greater one. People, especially younger readers, have given up on fiction on dead trees. They were happy to play the ‘literary fiction’ game in a gentler age, when it was the only game in town. Hell, some crazy old dudes even read short fiction in the pulps back in the day. But it’s a more packed playlist now: MMOGs, IM, BitTorrents, RSS feeds, happy slapping, texting, DS, Xbox, Twitter, FaceBook, iPods, iPads, YouTube, blogging, Tumblr, Angry Birds – you know the drill, right?

I suppose I was lucky in high school that my English teacher didn’t hold to such things— we were specifically encouraged to read fantasy and science fiction; I remember reading Howard Fast’s The First Men there, and many people’s marks took a good boost when writing up that one (we were tasked with writing a newspaper editorial about the experiment in the story).

When reading the article which provoked today’s discussion, I initially thought that perhaps the inflammatory title (downmarket genre fiction) was an addition by the editor, and that perhaps the writer herself had a more nuanced view. However, down towards the bottom were a couple of gems which rather cut short that hope:

The reading public in private is lazy and smutty. E-readers hide the material. Erotica sells well.

I’m not so sure it is wise to underestimate the boundless idiocy of the unobserved reading public. They may intend to go to the Economist website to read the latest in the euro crisis, but oops! they’ve ended up on Mail Online reading about the Kardashians.

…ok. That’s one way of putting it. Another might be: we read for entertainment, not self-betterment. Most people spend long days working, then most of their evenings working in another fashion: food, cleaning, caring for family. If we choose to spend our leisure time reading, we are more likely to read something entertaining than improving; simple fatigue will dictate that as the norm, if nothing else. Don’t think that it’s all slush, though. Of everything I’ve read in my life, no book has made me reach for the (conveniently built-in) dictionary than Gregory Macguire’s Wicked series. Damn that guy has some vocabulary. And how many other ‘genre fiction’ books — and genre fiction in a fantasy setting, based upon a line of children’s books, no less — would come with study notes included?

The establishment might choose to look down its nose at writing for the sake of story, but its nature does not make it automatically sub-standard.

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So there are Great Things afoot for ePub implementors. I have things being planned out nicely, and I should be able to make an official announcement & call for contributors in about a week, I think. Specifically anything about the frame layout model of WebKit/WebCore would be very useful to have in about a week’s time.

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harkaway:

The brain-meltingly amazing trailer for Angelmaker. ‘nuff said.

OMG THE SEXY IT’S TOO MUCH! CAN’T RESIST… MUST … OBTAIN … BOOK…

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I have a meeting tomorrow with a big-name company about helping to set up this ePub Author thing, following which I should be in a position to start getting a community process together and bringing people into the fold.

…so there’s that.

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More on ePub Author

In the few days since I suggested it there has been a lot of interest in pursuing the initiative. I’ve had contacts from a few companies looking to invest money, expertise, or people, and I’ve heard from a great many people who would love to see just such an application in the wild.

Read More

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ePub Author Coalition

So a few minutes ago I wrote:

I think there’s enough know-how in the industry outside of Apple to make a competitor to iBooks Author, by which desktop publishing in the eBook age can be as limitless in possibility as we can make it, yet not be restricted to a single target platform. I want to hear from experienced OS X software engineers who are interested in tackling such a project on a commercial (or possibly open-source, or both) scale, and from people companies who can contribute expertise or code to the effort.

I’m already getting a few good ping backs on this, which is fantastic. However, I’d like to enumerate a little more of what I have on my mind:

Engineers

We need engineers who can crank out top-notch OS X code. While I’d normally want to include anyone who’d like to cut their teeth on such an app, this time I think getting something of the highest quality out of the gate takes priority.

Software Development Companies

Apple has a head-start on us. Even if we started coding at the same time they did, they would still have a head-start. This is because iBooks Author is built on the same components used in the iWorks suite of apps, and those components go back to the mid-90s I believe (they were based upon apps originally written for NeXTStep). In order to avoid the ramp-up time in recreating those components, we would be interested in anyone who could either donate or license similar components to us. I’m visualizing the Omni Group’s apps here, for example.

Publishers, Retailers, Distributors, Oh My!

Anyone with an interest in eBooks and a budget to throw around. Particularly those who need to produce, validate, or tweak ePub3 content. How would you like to assist in funding such an effort? What would you like to see? What sort of terms would you like/accept— i.e. open-source free app only, n number of free copies, volume discounts, etc.

For the record: I’ve made overtures to my employer about the above. Although the guy who would likely be able to make anything happen is away in the UK next week, so don’t expect any announcements.

As before:

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iBooks Author vs. ePub Author

iBooks Author at the App Store

So, yesterday Apple launched the new iBooks Author application for the Mac. It looks great, produces fantastic dynamic content, and more than one person assumed that it was outputting ePub3 files. However, that was not the case, as is extensively documented by Daniel Glazman (co-chairman of the WC3 CSS working group) on his blog:

A wysiwyg EPUB3 editor will not be able to edit correctly an IBA document because of the different mimetype and the proprietary CSS extensions. iBooks Author is not able to reopen a iBook it exported in their pseudo-EPUB3 format because there is no Import mechanism! That means that on one hand EPUB3 readers cannot reuse a document created by iBooks Author because of its HTML/CSS/Namespaces extensions, and on the other iBooks Author cannot create an iBook from an existing EPUB3 document because it cannot import it.

In actuality, it even goes a little further than this.

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