#bcto09: Kindle, Shmindle notes

Speaker is Evan Leibovitch. He works at York and was given the mandate to make research more accessable.

From the crowd: What is DRM?
Answer from the crowd: It was used in the music business and it’s collapsing.

Gave the intro to the Kindle. Brings down books to $9.95. DRM required.

Introduces epub. Reflowable unlike PDF.

From the crowd: ePub specification people don’t communicate with W3C. W3C created CSS and HTML which is a moving target. IDPF is in maintenance right now so you can get involved.

Publishers can define themselves by how much control they give up.

More problems came up from the crowds. Adobe Digital Editions doesn’t support very many things. Why would a publisher care about how your font is kerned?

Also from the crowd: The form is part of books. If you don’t care about form, you’re just looking for information, not necessarily books. (I guess I’m not a book fan after all.) Have to think of books are more than trade paperbacks. Think graphic novels, textbooks, children’s picture books. (All of this would take creativity to make in CSS2.)

And from the crowd: It’s hard to give up the formatting control you’re used to with PDF when moving to ePub.

Seems everything is from the crowd. This is my first *camp.

Reminder from the crowd: A two hundred dollar book is that expensive due to paying author, editors, typesetters, etc. Ebooks save ten dollars.

UofT has more than half a million books available online. When talking with people after the session I explained the reason I don’t use the service is because I can’t take it anywhere and I can’t easily pop it onto my ereader.

Someone brought up that people trust print more than the internet. I brought up that people trust edited content, not print, more than most of the content on the internet. I haven’t bought a textbook in two years because I download Creative Commons licensed books. Instead I bought an ebook reader. Two hundred dollars once for four semesters instead of two hundred dollars per semester.

Someone asked if graphs and graphics were okay. I said that it’s okay if I turned the ereader sideways. I think I misinterpreted the question, it would be much harder to read something like an actuarial science textbook that would have many more tables. I’d get annoyed if I had to constant flip the ereader.

Running low on time here. I think that’s it.

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