1. Defining a Beginning

eBooks are by no means new. For years educators have been creating multimedia learning systems, businesses have been showing interactive kiosks, entrepreneurs have been showing electronic presentations, and corporations have been distributing PDF documents. Michael Hart's Project Gutenberg has been giving away electronic texts for, well, practically since computers were invented. A student creates an eBook when she writes a report for college. Your brother writes an eBook when he enters recipes into his computer. I listen to an eBook when I download an MP3 from...

"Wait," you might say. "Those aren't really eBooks." You might say that because you've noticed some fundamental difference between eBooks and other electronic things, but more likely you would say that because you have an intuitive notion of what an eBook is.

Unfortunately, many people have conflicting ideas about which electronic "things" are eBooks. Are eBooks hardware devices, or software? Are eBooks merely textual electronic content? Normal books can be shown on overhead projectors — is an electronic presentation an eBook? What's the difference between a file of recipes and a book full of recipies? An MP3 file isn't an eBook because you can't hear books — yet don't many companies sucessfully sell "audio books" on cassette?

It should be painfully obvious at this point that to adequately discuss the Open eBook specification, it might be wise to find out exactly what an eBook is. Somewhat less obvious but no less painful is that I don't really know what an eBook is, either. Sorry. Even if I did, well, it probably wouldn't be the same thing that you think an eBook is. And whatever we thought, we'd likely change our minds once we thought about it a little longer. But don't worry, you're in good company — no one else in the "eBook industry" knows what an eBook is, either, although they all have ideas about what they want you to think an eBook is.

Defining "eBook"

In this book we'll try to skirt the issue of creating an authoritative definition of an eBook, considering an eBook to broadly mean whatever electronic content you want to present. We'll specifically discuss the Open eBook Publication Structure and the types of content it allows one to publish, allowing you to determine whether this format is right for your content. While we discuss the Open eBook Publication Structure and related publications, though, we'll need to come to some definitions that we agree upon, at least in the context of our discussion, which will allow us to know what the other is talking about.

Electronic Book as an "Etext"

One of the first and most famous popularizations of books in electronic format was Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org). According to his own rendition (http://promo.net/pg/history.html), Michael Hart in 1971 was granted access to a mainframe at the University of Illinois. Wanting to make productive use of the precious time he had been allotted on such a scarce resource, he entered the United States "Declaration of Independence" electronically and attempted to send it to everyone on the networks.

Luckily, such an act occurred before the concept of spam and before the notoriety of computer viruses, so whatever negative repercussions of such unrequested correspondence did not spread far. Michael soon changed from actively sending these electronic texts (Etexts), as he calls them, to instead archiving them so that they can be downloaded from anyone at any time from anywhere. According to their published figures, Project Gutenberg went from archiving only 100 Etexts in January 1994 to 3333 Etexts in April 2001.

Michael Hart's Etexts were certainly related to books — they did contain the same text word for word (more or less, in many cases page numbers and all) as the book from which they were taken. There was nothing "book-like" about these works, though. A user can read an Etext with whatever tool he/she has available, such as a text editor or word processor. As electronic versions of textual content of a book, though, Etexts could certainly fit one definition of an "eBook."

"eBook" as a Marketing Tool

By the late 1990s, several companies were attempting to make electronic versions of books that not only replicated the book's content but also duplicated the look of a book. Nuvomedia made a device the size of a small paperback named the Rocket eBook, and Softbook created a somewhat larger device called the Softbook Reader. Both were dedicated eBook reading devices; their only purpose in their electronic life was to show electronic texts. It seemed that so much attention was paid to the small packages of plastic and silicon that the devices themselves were referred to as "eBooks". It never really seemed clear what the textual content was called.

One thing was clear, though: there needed to be some way for this textual content to somehow interoperate with both devices. Either company assumed it could win any war of device creation and marketing, but there were more immediate concerns: if the market for these new devices was to explode as these two companies hoped, they needed the help of the publishers from whom the textual content originated. They knew that publishers would not want to create electronic versions of their text in two separate formats, one for the Rocket eBook and another for the Softbook Reader.

In late 1998 these two companies were joined by a third: Microsoft. Together these corporations formed an informal group of companies that vowed to prevent a "VHS vs. Betamax" war of formats in the eBook industry by inventing a common format in which electronic information could be stored. The Open eBook (OEB) Authoring Group they formed set out to create a specification that would allow publishers to release content in one format and know that any of the devices could access the stored information.

Further divorcing the term "eBook" from the concept of a particular device was Microsoft's announcement in 1999 that it would be releasing the Microsoft Reader software. This software would run on any Windows-based computer and would allow eBooks to be downloaded and read without the need for a dedicated reading device. With the support of these two device manufacturers, a software giant, and other members of the OEB Authoring Group such as Versaware, Nokia, and GlobalMentor, the idea of an electronic book became a marketable idea around which each proponent could advance its own desires of profitability. The term "eBook" began to represent not just electronic text, but electronic text in the context of a new industry that would, it was claimed, change reading forever.

The eBook as Inevitable

At this point we haven't really come any closer to knowing what an eBook is, but we've picked up a few other terms such as "reader" and "publisher" which themselves cry out for definitions. Before inevitably drawing artificial lines in the sand, it would be profitable to examine just what is significant about the eBook as an industry.

It could be that the "universal format" argument of OEB is somewhat of a hollow one. As you'll learn, some parts of OEB by themselves are inadequate for complex textual content. Furthermore, although some software programs allow you to read OEB-based eBooks directly, on other devices and software products what you'll read is not OEB, but OEB text that has been manipulated and transformed into something specific to that device or software. eBooks in general and OEB in particular do in fact represent something very significant, though: the inevitability of electronic information storage and interaction.

  1. Convenience. Electronic song storage and listening is already too popular to fade. The convenience and space-saving efficiency of electronic music are no less significant in the world of electronic texts.
  2. Versatility. Once a book is in electronic format, it can be manipulated and presented in a variety of formats on a number of different devices.
  3. Storage Books that are stored electronically take up no physical space and can be transported with ease.

eBooks give the promise of true foreverness and universality to information. OEB is significant because its authors were wise enough to base it on several elegant standards that were already popular, robust, and that provide no roadblocks to international access. Will the OEB texts you create five years from now look like the OEB works you create today? Maybe. But because of OEB's foundations, the OEB eBooks you write will either work just as well as they do now or will be easily manipulated so that they can. In short, OEB is important because of the standards-compliant ways it requires you to encode your works. Whatever "OEB" means five years from now, the OEB works of today will still be useful.

The Meaning of OEB

A year of hard work by the Open eBook Authoring Group led to the release on 16 September 1999 of the Open eBook Publication Structure 1.0. This specification, which has recently been clarified and refined by version 1.0.1, defines a publication structure or format in which one can store a particular work. A work created in OEB format is called, appropriately, an OEB publication.

In early 2000 the OEB Authoring Group became a formal body named the Open eBook Forum (OEBF) (http://www.openebook.org). The term "OEB" itself is used in a multitude of contexts. Sometimes the OEB Forum is referred to as "OEB"; at other times, "OEB" refers to the OEB Publication Structure which defines OEB Publications. Here we'll try to be specific about how we use OEB unless the meaning is clear from the context. In general, "OEB" will be used to designate that something has been produced by the OEB Forum, such as the Open eBook Publication Structure itself.

OEB Class Diagram

The Open eBook Publication Structure is a specification for a document format, but to understand this format in context the specification divides the world into several abstract parts. In particular, a publication is meant for storing eBook content, and this content is processed and displayed to the user by a reading system. OEB calls the person reading the content the reader, which may be confusing to those who use software packages that contain "Reader" in their names.

OEB Activity Diagram

Is a reading system a piece of software? Perhaps, but it could also be a hardware device. In fact, the reading system could be a piece of software that processes the OEB publication and stores it in a different form to be read by the reader on a hardware device.

Reading System Class Diagram

The reading system is a convenient abstraction that allows the OEB publication structure specification to define how an OEB publication must be constructed, as well as how it must be interpreted and presented to a reader. As long as the rules in the OEB Publication Structure are followed, any number of things could work together and be classified as one "reading system". This allows a strict definition of how pieces of a system interact, without restricting innovation in implementing the various system components.

Is the OEB publication actually delivered to the reader? This depends on the particular reading system being used. Some reading systems may combine both the processing and the display of the OEB publication into one piece of software or into one hardware device. In other instances, a reading system may be composed of several components: one piece of software may read the OEB publication and interpret it and store it in a proprietary format that only the second display portion of the reading system can understand. It is then this proprietary version of the text that is used to display the data to the reader. In this scenario, the two pieces together would comprise the reading system.

OEB does not care what type (if any) of intermediate files are produced before the content is shown to the user. The usefulness of the OEB publication, therefore, is not directly related to the user, but to the publisher. The author and/or publisher must convert content to only one format: the OEB publication structure format. Any OEB-compliant reading system will have the means to either display the OEB publication directly, or to convert it into a format that it can display or allow another component to display.

The most important task as far as an author or publisher is concerned is therefore ensuring a work is in the OEB publication structure format. Any OEB-compliant reading system will be able to do whatever it needs to do to allow your content to be accessed by a reader.

Using OEB

All examples in this book (and this book itself) should be fully compliant with the Open eBook Publication Structure version 1.0.1. It should be possible to read each example using a OEB reading system that fully complies with the specification. As explained above, various OEB reading systems are available — some that use software combined with hardware, some that use separate software components, and some that can natively read an OEB-encoded work and display the eBook to the reader immediately.

The Mentoract™ Reader from GlobalMentor, Inc. is one example of a native software-based OEB reading system. To read the example eBooks presented here, simply load an OEB package file or an individual OEB document (both of which will be explained in upcoming chapters) in the Mentoract Reader by selecting File|Open... from the pull-down menu. The Mentoract Reader is written in the Java programming language and can therefore run on a variety of desktop and notebook operating systems. The Mentoract™ Reader is available from http://www.globalmentor.com/software/reader/ as a free download.

Other software-based reading systems, such as the Microsoft Reader from Microsoft Corporation, require two components for processing an eBook. The first component, such as the ReaderWorks software from OverDrive, Inc., manipulates the OEB files into a proprietary Microsoft file format named LIT. This LIT file can then be read using the Microsoft Reader. ReaderWorks is available from http://www.overdrive.com/readerworks/ and the Microsoft Reader is available from the http://www.microsoft.com/reader/ site.

Various hardware eBook devices exist as well. Each usually comes with the appropriate software to process your OEB files so that they can be used with the device. Check with your specific eBook hardware vendor for more information on regarding the level of OEB support.

Review

Summary