What is an sBook?

An sBook is an enhanced and personalized ebook which has been subtly enriched with context and conversation from multiple sources.  sBooks can change the way that readers and communities engage with extended content (books, essays, stories) and the knowledge and inspiration which they contain.

Concretely, an sBook differs from a conventional ebook in two ways:

• readers can share rich notes with their friends, their communities, and other readers;
• an extensible embedded knowledge base helps readers search and explore the book’s content.

Sharing. Most e-books have ways to add and save simple notes for personal use, but sBooks makes it simple to share those notes with friends, colleagues, or communities, even engaging in conversations “in the margin” of books we care about.   sBook notes, called glosses, can also include references, rich media, and tags which can make the book easier to search and navigate.  Third parties can also use glosses to metapublish against an sBook, creating sets of notes, tags, or references that enhance the book’s value and evolve with time.

Searching. Most e-books also have some kind of full text search and (sometimes) a version of the printed index, but an sBook uses a compact embedded knowledge base — a knowlet — to combine those functions.  When searching an sBook, the reader doesn’t need to know the exact words used by the author and can even search for abstract concepts or themes.  The book’s built-in knowledge base can be further extended by the tags and knowledge created by the reader’s friends, communities, or interested third parties.

These distinguishing features of sBooks are based on three key ideas: that content and meaning matter more than form and flash, that technology can change (for the better) how we engage with complex information, and that publishers (large, small, and tiny) need to focus on editorial added value to remain relevant and sustainable in the digital age.

To explore more, you can visit sbooks.net, read some sBooks, or experiment with converting your own documents into sBooks.  Let us know what you think!

Beautiful e-Books

“All aesthetics is functional, even if simply for our souls.”

Printed books are beautiful things.  Even the cheapest paperback, if you look closely, has the hallmarks of a process where individuals made thoughtful choices to enhance the reading experience.  From the chosen typeface to the page breaks to the spacing and separators, books are made to be read.  To see the importance of those choices, just send a large raw text file to your printer and try to read it!

In contrast, many e-Books are especially ugly even given the limitations of their form.  Early in my life as a Kindle owner, I bought the e-book of Poul Anderson’s “Brain Wave,” one of my favorite science fiction novels.  I was disturbed to find that the e-book rendering lost many structural cues, such as the appearance of breaks between sections within a chapter.

There are some great slides from Liza Daly which illustrate this problem (the names have been changed!) and make some points which I hadn’t originally realized.

One of the reasons for the ugliness is that e-book production is typically an afterthought on the print production process and is often out-sourced and based on unproofed versions of the text.  Furthermore, e-book renditions are often not proofed significantly by editors or publishers.

A deeper cause is that many print designers (and editors and publishers) have a prejudice about online design based on the ubiquity of bad design and the early days of the web.  But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Design is the process of thoughtfully making the choices you have around the choices you don’t.  Book designers have a huge number of design dimensions and  some significant constraints.  The constraints (beyond largely fixed content) are mostly financial in origin, such as the use of color, the size of pages and the linearity of their arrangement.  In the early days of online reading, the design space was nightmarish, because designers had very few choices and the choices they didn’t have were also variable, reflected in the diversity and adjustability of early browsers or display applications.

One of my friends and heroes at the MIT Media Lab was a graphic designer and visionary named Muriel Cooper.  Muriel was a character (in the best of senses) who had started the Visible Language Workshop at MIT after working as a book designer for MIT Press.  The work of Muriel and her students, starting in the 1980s, was about making new media (long before it was thus named) beautiful.

They started by fixing some obvious sources of ugliness: aliased fonts and crayola color models.  They went further to use the bleeding edge of technology to create new choices for designers, leveraging effects like three-dimensionality, translucency, or animated fonts.  Eventually, they developed models for how designs could automatically adapt to the devices or choices of readers.  These ideas found their way into online design by inspirational example, engagement with vendors, and passionate disciples.

Today it is possible to make beautiful online documents, even for the Web, using declared standards that are quickly converging towards ubiquity.  There are some lovely examples at the CSS Zen Garden and even some examples of e-books at the ePub Zen Garden.

There is no longer a good excuse for ugly e-books.

Let’s call them A-books

The iPad will apparently be using a proprietary Apple copy protection for its electronic books, according to an LA Times report which cites “anonymous publishing sources”.  This means that you won’t be able to read your Kindle or Barnes & Noble e-books on the iPad or your iPad books on other devices.

We should really refer to these products as a-books rather than e-books because they’re more like applications than books: they’re tied to a particular platform and vendor.  ”a-books” could also coincidentally stand for Apple-Books, Amazon-Books, or Adobe-Books, covering the three major flavors of DRM in use with digital books.  DRM stands for  ”digital rights management” and is (in all these cases) a kind of encryption used to prevent unauthorized copying and distribution.  The Sony and Nook e-readers both use DRM from Adobe Systems.  It isn’t yet known what kind of DRM will be used by Google Editions (though it might be interesting).

This isn’t really new, since most e-books already come with DRM which ties them to a particular platform, but there seemed to be some hopeful convergence on Adobe’s DRM with its adoption by multiple vendors, leaving Amazon as the odd man out with the proprietary DRM.  (Of course, the reliance on Adobe isn’t ideal either).  However, Apple’s decision changes all of this.

The iPad’s book reading application will reportedly use Apple’s own FairPlay DRM, which they use for movies and TV shows and (until recently) music.  This is distinct from the Adobe DRM used on Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the Sony readers, and other products.  It is also distinct from the DRM used on Amazon’s Kindle, though the Kindle also has an entirely different e-book format altogether, rather than the ePub format which everyone else seems to be using.

It will be interesting to see what happens to the existing iPhone reader applications, especially the offerings from Kindle and Barnes & Noble (and more interesting ones from other sources).  If Apple lets these applications work on the iPad, you will be able to read your Kindle and Barnes & Noble books on your iPad, just not with the native reading application.  It would also let creative developers come up with even better ways of using the iPad as an e-reader.

However, Apple has an explicit policy of barring applications which replace core functionality.  That was one explanation of Apple’s rejection of the “Google Voice” application which got some anti-trust attention last year.  It is also the reason that alternative web browsers are not generally available in the App Store.  Will this policy bar those kinds of applications not that there is new native functionality?  It would be a questionable move on Apple’s part, but certainly conceivable.  One interesting move would be to provide a way that those applications could connect to the native iPad “bookshelf” and to offer/require that purchasing on the iPad happen through Apple’s in-app purchase infrastructure (where Apple gets a cut).

In the long run, there’s a slightly more than philosophical argument that a given product is not “really” a book (with its connotations of durability and portability) if it’s tied to a device or vendor.  If that’s the case (and books continue to exist), these a-books are a transitional form awaiting either some kind of open and portable DRM (not an oxymoron) or the evolution of publishing beyond dependence on DRM (as has happened in music).  In this scenario, there’s a chance that early adopters (like myself) will end up as either victims (losing purchases to vendor evolution) or criminals (breaking the DRM on books we’ve purchased so we can read them on different devices).   But I’m hoping for a better outcome!