Book People Archive

Re: Part 2 of PDF, DRM, and "open" formats 

A very provocative essay, John.

> Users often want limits to open-endedness in their formats and programs.

I'm not sure how meaningful this is.  People are often perplexed and
dismayed by the intrinsic complexity of the world and things in it,
and often wish they were simpler.  That doesn't mean that they can
*be* simpler and still be effective.

> A corollary of this principle
> is that you can't honestly market a digital format to consumers as "open"
> if you're happy to let people advertise books as being in that "open"
> format despite having proprietary dependencies.

The issue here is that publishers look at what's happened to the
music world with horror, and demand DRM.  But there's no rhetorically
convincing way to include DRM in a format without either secret
mechanisms or oppressive mechanisms up with which consumers will not
put.  So any format which will convince publishers will essentially
have to be non-open, in your terms.  PDF seems to walk this fine line
as well as any other format I've seen.

> the first "Open Ebook Publishing Structure"
> (OEBPS) specification was released in September 1999.

Just about the time the ebook bubble was collapsing.  There was a big
to-do about ebooks in 97 and 98, before people realized that they
couldn't sell them for enough money to make a business out of it.

> So, do you have any books in this single universal format that's now
> been around for nearly 7 years?  Me neither.

I'm probably rare in having actually put a book into this format (to
see how hard it would be).  But I'd argue that the Microsoft Reader
format is a pretty good rendition of the intended expression of OEBPS
in the consumer marketplace, and lots of people have ebooks in Reader
format.

> Many of the
> proprietary books now being sold do in fact include encoded OEBPS
> documents wrapped up in some other format, but that makes no difference
> to the consumer, who can't use the OEBPS directly.  And we now have what
> I would consider a relatively tiny, unattractive consumer market for ebooks.

You're implying a causal relationship here which is questionable at
best.  There are many many larger problems with the general delivery
platform for ebooks than the format.  My bet is that if every ebook
published were in OpenReader or another of the XML-based formats, we'd
still have a tiny unattractive consumer market for ebooks.  The format
is not the core problem.

> On the other
> hand, there are lots of people on this list who are perfectly willing to
> "publish" works online in suitable formats without any DRM.

But of course those publications won't do anything to improve the
tiny, miserable consumer market for ebooks.  Though connoisseurs (like
us) will appreciate them, of course :-).

> It's also
> clear from our discussion to this point that many, though not all, forms
> of DRM effectively make a format no longer "open", at least as actually used.

Bingo.  Commercial OpenReader ebooks will be essentially the same as
commercial MS Reader books once the DRM has them locked up.  If Jon,
David, and their crew can solve this basically social problem, I'll be
amazed and grateful.

By the way -- "not all"?  Which DRM systems were you thinking of?
Once the format is well-enough documented that someone can write a
clean-room reader for it, that someone can also decide to respect or
not respect the bits which define which rights the holder of that
document should be given.  That's why you can't understand the
Complete New Yorker files by reading the DjVu spec, or the commercial
Adobe Reader ebook files by reading the PDF spec.  Ditto MobiPocket
and MS Reader ebooks.

Bill