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May 2005

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OpenReader announcement: Open-standards eBook Format and Reading System Development Discussion Groups
by Jon Noring 04 May '05

04 May '05

Quick Summary (including how to subscribe): ------------------------------------------- You are invited to subscribe and participate in one or both of the following discussion groups (hosted at YahooGroups) supporting the ongoing activities of the OpenReader Consortium: 1) "openreader-format": OpenReader Format Specification (an open-standards ebook and digital publication/document distribution format), and 2) "openreader-devel": Development of an open-source, license-free, multi-platform reference implementation of an OpenReader reading system ("user agent"). (Both projects will be summarized in the next section. For more detailed information, refer to http://www.openreader.org/ .) If you have a supportive interest in either topic, we invite you to subscribe to the group of interest. (Those who subscribe to the "user agent development" group are strongly urged to also subscribe to the Format group.) By joining either of these groups, there is no implied commitment to become an active participant in either of the associated Working Groups, although we certainly hope you will. We welcome your thoughts and insights, even if you choose not to actively participate in formal Working Group activities. The home pages to the two groups are found at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/openreader-format/ http://groups.yahoo.com/group/openreader-devel/ There is a link to subscribe to each group at the group's home page. Or, you can subscribe to either using the following email addresses: openreader-format-subscribe(a)yahoogroups.com openreader-devel-subscribe(a)yahoogroups.com If you prefer not to go through the process of subscribing yourself to either group, I'll be more than happy to subscribe you. Just email me (jon(a)openreader.org or jon(a)noring.name) your request to join -- be sure to specify which group(s) -- along with the email address you want to use to receive group messages. More Detailed Information about OpenReader: ------------------------------------------- As noted in the prior section, the best online resource explaining OpenReader is the current OpenReader web site (planned to soon undergo a much-needed major update and upgrade): http://www.openreader.org/ OpenReader is a cooperative project to create an open, standards-based digital publication distribution format to facilitate current, continuing, and long-term access to ebooks and other types of digital publications and documents. The OpenReader distribution format will be based on well-established XML vocabularies, publication frameworks, and W3C technologies. This includes OEBPS (the Open eBook Publication Structure framework), XHTML, CSS, MathML, SVG and XLink, to name the more important ones. Our current plans also include eventual native support for TEI, NewsML, and possibly other advanced and specialized document markup vocabularies and publication frameworks. The OpenReader Consortium will also support the development of reference implementations of programs to render OpenReader-compliant documents on a number of devices, and to convert OpenReader-compliant documents to other publication formats, such as PDF/A. There is a clear need for such a distribution format, given the present anarchy of multiple, incompatible, inflexible, and proprietary publication formats which do not provide the reading experience consumers want and publishers strive for. David Rothman, in his TeleRead blog covering the ebook, digital library, and related industries (http://www.teleread.org/blog/) aptly describes this situation as the "Tower of eBabel". While the initial focus of the OpenReader Consortium is primarily on ebooks, we intend to make the distribution format flexible enough to be applicable to a wide variety of digital publications and documents, such as periodicals, newspapers, document collections, white papers, many types of business documents, etc. We even envision the OpenReader format to be quite useful for encapsulating and archiving standards- conformant Web sites. When the HTML format and HTTP protocol were developed more than a decade ago, NCSA developed a "web browser", Mosaic, to support the format and protocol. The success of the World Wide Web was due as much to the wide-spread availability of the NCSA Mosaic browser, as it was to the openness and availability of the HTML and HTTP specifications. Similarly, we believe that it is important to develop, in conjunction with the OpenReader Format, a cross-platform, open-source, license-free reference implementation of an OpenReader rendering program, which will make the OpenReader Format Specification truly useful, to establish uniform rendering behavior, and to spur others to build their own conforming OpenReader user agents. ***** We look forward to your joining either or both groups, even if to lurk. If you know of others who may be interested in OpenReader, feel free to forward this announcement to them. We are also building a Consortium of interested companies and organizations in the digital publication and document universe who see the open-standards OpenReader as furthering their business and institutional objectives. Of course, we are looking for dedicated individuals, who agree with the OpenReader philosophy, to become leaders and help to make OpenReader a success. Thanks. Jon Noring OpenReader Consortium jon(a)openreader.org jon(a)noring.name

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