Apple textbooks and EPUB 3 vs. EPUB 2

It took some time to get back with a new post. May be the fact that nothing really interesting happens should be considered a reason.
Well .. actually things happen but are any of those things really revolutionary?
The last few days I was bombarded with information about the Apple textbook initiative. This really looks revolutionary but it is not. It is just a company that has enough power to try to disrupt what everybody thinks that it has to be changed. On the other hand they are trying to much to secure the revenue from this. This is too visible to alow the program to be revolutionary. They are just flexing some muscle.
On the other hand I can't say I don't appreciate the effort. At least they do something. This is not somethig to be said about anything in the commercial or open source / public area.

To be fair I did not even bothered to look for details about the format. I suppose they decided to do what it takes to have something viable and this is what they should. If you care too much about the standards nothing new will get in front. The format is just a matter of strategy ... Tim Cook is good at executing things and I'm sure it has the strategy. Considering the fact that they havea product on the market they definitely have also a vision .... whether this vision is correctly targeted with the strategy and aligned with the market capacity to absorb something new is another thing to be seen.

The apple textbooks offer text wrap around objects, multimedia content and .. and actually that's all we can say about them.

If we look at the features that EPUB 3 bring on, I don't see a good reason for them to depart too much from the standard:

Feature	EPUB 2	EPUB  3	Functionality
CSS3 support	No	Yes	Better control over line break, hyphenation etc.
Multiple style sheets	No	Yes	Supports the ability to include multiple style sheets allowing for improved layout control
Embedded fonts	No	Yes	Allow fonts to be delivered along with the EPUB file.
SVG support	No	Yes	Bring on the vector graphic functionality to EPUB area. It was strange not to have something like that in a pure electronic publication.
epub: type	No	Yes	Support for semantic meaning
epub: trigger	No	Yes	Support for creation of  user interfaces for controlling multimedia objects.
XHTML 5 support	No	Yes	Inherits most of the definitions of semantics, structure and processing behaviours from HTML5
MathML	No	Yes	Direct embedding of MathML supported ... enables rendering of mathematics content as text instead of images
Scripting	No	Yes	Support for scripted content, ie interactivity, using JavaScript language
Audio&Video	No	Yes	Inherits support for HTML5 rich media elements

Apple had anything at hand in the standard. May be they just palyed with the implementation. This remains to be seen.
Wish you all the best.

How long the name can be?

A friend asked me a very simple question.
And lucky me I had a computer in front to check my answer before telling him something stupid.
The question was: "I am on a Windows 7 machine. And it looks like I am not able to put my files in a deep subfolder. How many characters are allowed in a Windows 7 path?".
My first thought was to say: "around 32k". Before saying I've checked the info and it looks I was wrong.
The 32k is ok for the filesystem but the operating system is a different story. According to MSDN

"In the Windows API (with some exceptions discussed in the following paragraphs), the maximum length for a path is MAX_PATH, which is defined as 260 characters."

This is definitely something to keep in mind when you work with lots of files folders and data in general.

Not so much about publishing but ...

Asked about what industry I serve the answer is always "information industry". One of the aspects involved in this is programing, development of web applications and so on. In fact all of them are formating, processing or distributing information.
I do a lot of my projects in Python and one thing that I've faced several times was the clasic file upload.

Here it is the smalest snipet of Python code I use for that:

input type="file" name="selectedfile"
input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Upload"

upload_dir = "c:/"
fileitem = request.file('selectedfile')
name=fileitem.filename[string.rfind(fileitem.filename,'\\'):]
fout = file(str(upload_dir+name), 'wb')
while 1:
  chunk = fileitem.file.read(1000)
  if not chunk: break

fout.write (chunk)
fout.close()

I've looked over the web for something like that and all solutions looked like incomplet and not that direct.
Hope you will find it usefull.

The better eBook

Yesterday I wrote about making an ebook from an art book. It was like a call for ideas. And here it is one sample of that. An article struck me right this morning: Future of publishing: Reinventing the concept of the book
It is a pleasure to see that somebody understand the real use of the interactivity in the books life.
I'll try to search for more products like that and post them here. Would be an interesting journey.

Make an ebook of that

The news that draw my attention this time is about a special book. I is something like an art book for chiefs. You can find it here.
I bet it is a delight to turn a pages of a book like that. On the other hand I wonder something very simple. Are we able to put such a feeling into an ebook?
I'll start the answer to that using another question: What is that thing that makes an art book?

If you read the article you understand some of the aspects:
- Special support (art-quality paper and a kitchen-proof plastic-coated manual)
- Very good design (most cookbooks are very good at that)
- True workmanship (50 people participate to this project for as long as 5 years)

I think I've already answered the main question.
I'm not worried about the support. You just have to think about a case enhancement for one of the leading slates on the market. Take an iPad for example, put it in a nice leather cover and here you have the support. Shiny, and very luxurious.
What about the rest? Well the rest is the same old story. Designing an ebook is like doing the same thing for a good book. You just have more freedom to use not only good typography and nice images and lots of free space but also new media and smart features to surprise the reader.
Depending on the features you want you can create an entire app to serve as a book or if you want to have it cross platform create it as a PDF using all the clever things the format provides.
Actually if you sell the device with the book already loaded you might find that the production costs are lower than the paper version.
Here we are again with the same old question: Why nobody tries to create good looking ebooks? Or may be I don't know about them? Please be so kind and give me a sign if you know about any.

Protected or not ... The PDF story

I definitely don't want to start a flame war regarding the DRM capabilities of the PDF format or of any of the asociated solutions. This is the year of the ebook so the inevitable happened. A friend asked me to give him some options to chose from in order to publish his books in PDF format and have at least minimal protection for it.
This was a trigger for an interesting ride. Interesting because I realized that in order to have a winner you have to define the most important features.

I am at least a little technical inclined and I understand the concept of features, benefits and advantages from a technical standpoint. On the other hand I am not the owner of the content and I don't intend to use such a solution at least for the short-medium term.
Given this situation, how do I select the best DRM solution for PDF? The answer is ... I can't select it.
I can continue of course by listing here long tables with features bet let's be fair. Who will read them?
Instead I will just give you my Top 3 DRM solutions for PDF protection and list some aspects that I consider relevant when I chose them.

Here they are:

Top 3 DRM solutions for PDF protection

1. LockLizard PDF Security: http://www.locklizard.com/pdf_security.htm
2. Vitrium ProtectedPDF: http://www.protectedpdf.com/
3. FileOpen Toolkit: http://www.fileopen.com/products/fileopen-toolkit/


Now the reason for the positioning of each of those suppliers/products:

Locklizard has a very easy to understand business proposal. The price is there on the website and you know what you buy. You start at 2495 USD per year or a 4995 USD for a perpetual licence.

Vitium ProtectedPDF looks like a more complete document protection solution. At first sight it is cheaper too at a 1200 USD per year price tag. There is an issue that minimize those advantages. The licensing scheme was created in such a way that it sound like "Hey, we are here to take your money not to give you a solution". May be it is just me but I don't like that. On the other hand If you want to start small and don't expect to distribute many document to many readers then Vitrium has definitely a leg start becouse of it's low price.

FileOpen Toolkit it is ... how should I say? It is a framework that offers you a lot of flexibility. That comes with a price. They don't give us an estimate of costs. You don;t know how much It will cost you to create that book selling machine of you dream. Of course, we can always ask but when it comes with software licenses + some development and integration costs we can be sure the price tag is not very low. Anyway it worth keeping an eye on them. Who knows what the future will offer us.

Hope that you will find this post useful. It is not the definitive guide you probably expect to find but it gives you a lead. I wish you all the best in your own research and hey .. if you find some usefull information on the subject you can always come back and make sugestions here.