The Mobile E-Book Reader

The Mobile E
-
Book Reader

Brian Kelly

UK Web Focus

UKOLN

University of Bath

UKOLN is supported by:

Email

B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk

URL

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/

Abstract

This talk will describe the
portable e
-
Book reader
by placing it in a historical
context, describe the
dangers of the current
confusion in terminology
and the importance of
standards and strategic
thinking.

2

Contents

•
Introduction

•
Historical Perspective

•
The E
-
Book
–

What Is It?

•
Publishing For The E
-
Book

•
Beyond The E
-
Book


The Digital Talking
Book

•
Conclusions

3

About Me

Brian Kelly:

•
UK Web Focus

–

a JISC
-
funded post to advise
UK Higher and Further Education communities on
Web developments

•
Based in
UKOLN

–

a national focus for digital
information management located at the

University of Bath

•
Provides advice to UK HE / FE communities on
best practices for providing Web services

•
Recent involvement in looking at the potential for
e
-
books within HE / FE (with links with Library
sector)

•
First used a mainframe computer in 1974

4

Devices

A history of mainstream computer devices

Old

Paper tape

Punch card

Terminal

VDUs

Graphics
terminal

Micro (e.g. BBC,
Commodore,
Sinclair)


Current

PC

Macintosh

Unix / Linux
workstations
and servers

Emerging

E
-
Book

WAP, GPRS, 3G

Digital TV

PDAs

Kiosks

Laptop (for students)

Networking technologies:
Wireless LANs /
Bluetooth

Failures?

X Terminals

NCs (Network
Computers)

Thin Clients

Futures

Watches

Wearables

Electronic ink (eink.com)

…

5

Lessons

Marketplace

•
Need to be aware of marketplace developments:


PC as winner / NC as failure / Mac as niche market

•
New products and apps are appearing rapidly

–

and are disappearing too! (dot.com collapses)

Avoidance of proprietary lock
-
in

•
Avoid being locked into a device (cf. BBC Micro
CBL applications; dongles for PC software; etc.)

•
Free readers aren’t enough (cf. browser plugins)

•
Royalty
-
free licences aren’t enough (cf. GIF)

Standards

•
Support for standards essential to:


Minimise locking dangers


Allow resources to be reused

6

NetLibrary
–

Case Study

Spring / Summer
2001

NetLibrary

taking
high profile in various
e
-
Book seminars
around UK
Universities (e.g.
SCURL/SLAMIT
seminar in June
2001)

Autumn 2001

NetLibrary
bankrupt,
and being purchased
by OCLC

7

Current Position

We’ve been here before. What is different today?

•
Information hungry society (multiple TV channels,
email lists, SMS messages, voice mail, …)

•
Pervasive networking … coming in UK (e.g. free
network access from PCs in shopping malls in
Hong Kong)

•
Demand from a computer literate student intake
(Nintendo generation)

•
Demand for universal access for all


“
Where can I read my email?
”
-

typical question for the
academic at a conference. The answer is now not just
the conference’s PC facility’s but laptop / PDA + mobile
phone / landline / wireless LAN

8

Benefits

Devices Purchased By Users

•
Pass on capital and supports costs to students!

•
Laptop policy for students attempted at Warwick
-

but
students are buying mobile phones and PDAs anyway

Mobile Access

•
Providing access from home / from anywhere will:


Minimise transport costs, ease congestion, etc.


Minimise demand on institutional facilities


Offline reading should be a good thing,

and it’s desirable to facilitate this

Universal Accessibility

•
Access to resources for people with a range of
disabilities

9

What is An E
-
Book (1)

Which of the following gives the closest approximation
to your view of the term “
E
-
Book
”:

•
Access to book
-
like resources from a computer

•
Managed access to book
-
like resources,
providing Library
-
type facilities, such as
reservation, loans, MARC records, etc.

•
A hand
-
held device (as described 20 years ago in
“HitchHiker’s Guide To The Galaxy”)

•
A talking book

•
Something else

•
All of the above


10

What Is An E
-
Book (2)

An e
-
book can be:

•
A trendy name for any resource on the Web

•
A resource (often large

and
book
-
like
) to which

access is managed (and

resource often
encrypted
)

•
A format which describes

book
-
like structures and

corresponding functions

•
A resource designed for

reading on small devices

•
Name of device used to

read files in e
-
book format

This talk focuses on the small device (and corresponding formats)

11

Mobile Devices

A range of different types of mobile devices are available

E
-
Book

Reader

Mobile Phone

Siemens

hybrid phone,
MP3 player and
PDA



Hybrid

eBookman


hybrid e
-
book
reader, MP3
player and PDA
(was at Argos for
£169)

Traditional E
-
Book reader
such as
Rocket

cost about $249

PDA

Palms

PDAs
are available

from £100
-
£400

12

Some Personal Comments

Dedicated E
-
Book Reader

•
Heavy (large hardback) but good for sustained
reading

PDA

•
Usable for multiple purposes (calendaring,

note
-
taking, email, Web browsing,, …)

Hybrid

•
PDA plus MP3 music player looks attractive to
youth market

Mobile Phone

•
“
Communications, not content, is king!
” as we’ve
seen from popularity of mobiles and SMS.

13

Exploiting The New Devices

The Researcher

•
Plugs mobile device into desktop machine and
downloads W3C Web site for reading over weekend

•
Uses intelligent agent to find relevant resources
from e
-
print archives and downloads to mobile
device for reading on (long) train journey

The Student

•
On Friday evening in student bar, a friend mentions
some useful reading resources. She takes out her
mobile device and, using the Student Union’s
wireless network, she downloads the resources

The Social Animal

•
I plan my TV and radio viewing and visits to

cinema using personalised AvantGo settings

14

An Unsolicited Quote

“
I'm a real fan of eBooks
-

particularly because
they are easier to hold than a book!


I have a
spinal injury and I have read more books in the
last 6 months that the previous 6 years”

Unsolicited email message received by a
colleague following a presentation she gave

on e
-
Books


15

Managing The New Devices

Procurement and Management of the
Devices
:


IT services responsible for hardware procurement
and manage PC clusters, but who will lend out the
devices?


Do IT services negotiate preferred deals and
leave users to buy?

Procurement And Management Of The
Content
:


Clearly a task for the library?

Publishing

Your Own Content:


Let’s not forget this


Who defines strategy for publishing?


cf. the Web
–

initial interest in finding content, now
in publishing

16

E
-
Book Format Wars

PDF Derivative

•
Based on Adobe’s PDF format

•
Well
-
established, well
-
used

•
Proprietary, and based on appearance

rather than structure

XML Derivative

•
Based on XML

•
XML is now well
-
established

•
Open standards, and, being based based on
document structure, supports re
-
purposing

“My Proprietary Format”

•
Other companies muscling in, and making an
attractive offer to convert your documents

to their locked format

17

Proprietary Formats

Warnings:

•
Dangers of
proprietary
formats

•
Difficulties in
reuse of
resources

•
Difficulties in
managing
browser
plugins

http://www.tboook.com/faq3.shtml

How does Davtel's proposed e
-
book solution work?

The publisher sends the book in any electronic format to
a 3rd party storage company, where it will be translated
to our format free of charge.

18

Peace In Our Time?

There has been:

•
Recognition of the
dangers of format wars

•
Agreement between the
two main camps

•
Adoption of XML :
-
)

•
See OeB (Open eBook
Forum) Web site

<
http://www.openebook.org/
>

Note also AAP ‘standards’ work in rights management, metadata and numbering
–

see <http://www.publishers.org/home/ebookstudy.htm>

19

Unresolved Issues

Standards issues still be resolved include:

•
Digital Rights Management (DRM)

The book publishing world is aware of the
difficulties that music publishers found
themselves in with applications such as Napster

EBX

is a proposed DRM standard

•
Cataloguing Information

ONIX

(ONline Information eXchange)

is a
proposed standard for sharing catalogue
information between publishers and libraries

•
…

20

Creating An E
-
Book

21

Viewing

Here is what the the
resource looks like
using their viewing
software

E
-
ditorial

This file was created using
the
E
-
ditorial

software.

What is an e
-
book?

“
A simple explanation would
be to say that an e
-
book is a
self
-
running computer
program
-

an executable file.
”

i.e. this is a proprietary
format!

See <
http://www.e
-
ditorial.com/
>.

22

Another Creation Tool

Drag and drop a Web resource

23

A Better Way

Is this ease of creation desirable:

•
It’s easy to create a HTML page

•
It’s easy to update Web pages to HTML 4/XHTML

•
It’s easy to create a PDF version

•
It’s easy to create a WAP site

•
It’s easy to make use of Flash

•
…

Is this true?

If you have a large Web site to maintain and
wish to support multiple devices (some which
may not take off) you will have to use an
automated approach to content management

24

Resource Reuse

You should store your resources in a neutral,
richly
-
structured format (ideally XML)

XML

Database

XHTML

WML

E
-
book

format

Print

PDF

Specialist

formats

B2B

formats

Local script /

CMS /

XSLT transformation

Can you think of any valid
reasons for
storing

resources in a
proprietary format, with limited
scope for reuse?

Are:

•
To provide encryption & security

•
To outsource the digitisation

•
To get fancy bells and whistles

good enough reasons?

25

PDAs are becoming more advanced

e.g. consider the
Franklin E
-
bookman
:

•
Advertisement:

“
Listen to a song, Schedule a Meeting,

Listen to a Book, Take a Note
”

•
It provides audio facilities

•
Subscription options ($13 / month

in US) for Audible books (see

<
http://www.audible.com/
>):

“over 12,000 audiobooks from that ranges from bestsellers
to radio programs to
The Wall Street Journal”

•
Cost $150 (at Amazon.com)

•
See <
http://www.franklin.com/eBookMan/
>

Beyond The E
-
Book

Note: before buying one read the reviews!

26

E
-
Books and Talking Books

We are seeing convergence with other devices.
For example consider the
Rio
consumer device:

•
“The
Rio 800

comes with 64 MB of

memory, enough for about an hour

of MP3 music. It can also accommodate

Windows Media Audio (WMA) files,

which can stretch the playing time out

to nearly two hours ...

It plays Audible formats 2, 3, and 4 and

it holds up to 20.5 hours of programming.”

•
Cost $225 (at Amazon.com)

•
Subscription options for Audible books (via
Amazon.com
–

but not Amazon.co.uk)

27

Digital Talking Books

New
Talking Book
devices:

•
Digital devices aimed at visually impaired

•
Use an XML DTD

•
Standards work coordinated by the Daisy
Consortium

•
See <
http://www.daisy.org/
>

•
The proposed national standard for the
Digital Talking Book (Z39.86
-
200x) is out for
ballot
–

see <
http://www.niso.org/
>


28

… and Voice Browsers

Another mobile device is the Voice Browser:

•
Use your mobile phone to interact with voice
-
enabled Web services

•
Work being coordinated by W3C (see
<
http://www.w3.org/Voice/
>)

•
Work currently stopped due to concerns over
patent claims



29

Putting It All Together

W3C’s SMIL:

•
Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language

•
W3C’s open standard for integrating streaming
audio and video with images, text, etc.

•
Potential accessibility benefits

•
See <
http://www.w3.org/AudioVideo/
>


30

Conclusions

To conclude:

•
There are many new consumer devices arriving
which appear to have potential for general use

•
Will also have benefits for people with disabilities

•
Inevitably some devices and formats will fail to
gain acceptance (remember BetaMax!)

•
Avoid proprietary lock
-
in:


Dangerous if you choose a failure (Betamax)


Dangerous if you choose a winner (Microsoft)

•
Management of access to e
-
books is important

•
Creation of e
-
book resources also important

•
There will be new devices
–

which makes
standards and interoperability even more important