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1. dliup

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   06/18, 04:50pm | report spam | close reply

   PDF

   They can always publish to DRM-free PDF.
   
   Whiners. Jeez.

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1. Roehlstation

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   06/18, 05:05pm | report spam | close reply

   Version 1

   People often forget that.

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1. bobolicious

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   06/18, 05:20pm | report spam | close reply

   my enthusiasm

   for the 'new medium' is exactly so - 'books' may be reinvented rather than translated - as the printing press redefined literature (apparently monks needed soundproof booths & read aloud) so too I suspect the eBook is only just starting a dramatic transition in possibilities - authoring will actually be the greater beneficiary assuming authors can keep up with the exponential increase in access to the universe of references...

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1. Flying Meat

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   06/18, 05:25pm | report spam | (1 reply) close | reply

   I think I saw

   some pretty wacked formatting in one of the e-magazines promoted for the iPad. I'm reasonably certain it was mostly by design. And really, what is the big deal? Can you read the content? Is the content somehow more compelling or relevant having been formatted out the wahzoo? I'd argue that it is less so in many cases.
   
   "My coffee table book doesn't have any weight to it when read on the iPad!" :P
   
   Here's something I hadn't thought of before with regard to the iPad. Some people like to read while they're using the bathroom. ewwww. No! I don't want to examine your iPad.

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1. cmoney

   Mac Enthusiast

   Joined: Sep 2000

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   06/18, 05:34pm | report spam | close reply

   you're right, apple has done nothing

   except introduce a relatively open platform where you can add support for your blio format if you got off your lazy a$$ and stopped whining. a platform that also has the ability to consolidate books from multiple ebookstores including B&N and Kindle.
   
   sounds like they've done more for ebooks than a closed proprietary hardware device like the kindle or nook.

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1. Feathers

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   06/18, 05:56pm | report spam | close reply

   Kurzweil???

   Did I miss the newsflash that declared that Kurzweil wasn't an idiot? Last time I looked he was still a dopey deluded cretin but maybe I'm not entirely with it.

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1. Tralthamidor

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   06/18, 06:27pm | report spam | (1 reply) close | reply

   ??

   Sorry guys but DRM has nothing to do with the formatting problem.
   
   I work in publishing and the current state of affairs is a disaster concerning e-books. Many standards but epub is emerging as a main contender. Sony, Kindle and others ask for a PDF for convenience but they just dump into their proprietary product without formatting.
   
   PDFs don't solve the problem because the formatting is baked in. ie: page breaks are set for an 8.5 x 11. So you are scrolling and you get the last line on the page and it is an orphan. The formatting has to be done with CSS/HTML so that it is dynamic and can be controlled with stylesheets. Unfortunately this info is not passed on to the PDF and only the most current books can get this from the stylesheets in InDesign. Quark doesn't offer this.
   
   To do an ebook is labor intensive, add graphics and it becomes cost prohibitive. Everybody is just waiting until the format winner is crowned so they don't have to do it again.
   
   Feathers: you are way off base. Raymond Kurzweil is a brilliant man. The work he has done with OCR and text-to-speech for the blind and specifically the work he did with Stevie Wonder is generally accepted as one of the first major achievements in artificial intelligence.
   
   "dopey deluded cretin"? That's pretty rude.

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1. iphonerulez

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   06/18, 06:31pm | report spam | close reply

   The iPad has only been out a short while

   and certainly the platform needs time to mature than merely a few months before it can be said to be destroying the entire publishing industry.
   
   I'm thinking that there should continue to be single purpose reader devices that can handle everything publishers throw at it and leave everything intact. And even if you changed character size it wouldn't throw off page references and such. I guess all the publishers need to get together and arrive at an electronic format that nearly everyone agrees with.

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1. charlituna

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   06/18, 07:08pm | report spam | close reply

   Much Ado about Nothing

   For a lot of books, it's the text that matters. Not the format. For those where it does matter, you make a reader for it or use PDF etc. It's really not a huge deal. If you do well for your book you can actually monetize it into an app you allow others to use for the same gig. Double win.
   This is basically what ScrollMotion is trying to do

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1. ccoulson

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   06/18, 07:40pm | report spam | close reply

   Blio for iPad?

   If Kurzweil's Blio is so good, why doesn't he port it to the iPad???

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1. baggy_pants

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   06/18, 08:17pm | report spam | close reply

   Blio is being ported

   to Mac and iPhone (among others) and I'm supposing by extension, that means the iPad also. The app among many other things also supports highlighting and annotating, it's pretty impressive.
   
   All that aside, he's simply saying Apple had to fudge it a little to make it look as functional as his app, what's wrong with that? Present a challenge and hopefully Apple will rise to the occasion.

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1. Salty

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   Joined: Jul 2005

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   06/18, 10:00pm | report spam | close reply

   Likely

   Likely what you're gonna see in the future is Apple will say oh hey everyone remember how we're one of the top book sellers now? Well now we can introduce this killer book format and Publishers are actually gonna listen to us and use it! And hopefully they make it open enough that their competitors can use it too... who knows they might even do that.

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1. Jonathan-Tanya

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   06/18, 11:11pm | report spam | close reply

   Books are about good writing

   Frankly he has some points, but in general books are about good writing, not good layout.
   
   The Kindle did wonders for ebook sales, before that, the industry was dependent upon Microsoft and Adobe for leadership - yes, I'm not telling a joke.
   
   Sales were absolutely dismal, Microsoft understood the ebook space about as well as they can design a phone, make a tablet, or compete with iTunes.
   
   Kindle started it... they finally got ebook sales going, and now Apple is continuing it, but Kindle is still the leader so far.
   
   I disagree that publishers are waiting...they dump their books in ebook format all the time.

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1. MayNotBeToScale

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   06/19, 12:02am | report spam | close reply

   Retail Front-End

   What many are missing is Kurzweil's partnership with a book seller, Baker & Taylor. This puts them in direct competition with Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple iBooks, and, possibly, Google. While the iPad may have a "jerry-rigged" demo of a book page, the book image used in this article is the only one Kurzweil has been using ... jerry-rigged as well? Maintaining a book's formatting is simply a matter of showing images ... "pictures of pages." Whether stripped from a .pdf or in another popular image file format, it is transmission-challenged and AT&T will not be the only carrier brought to its knees. Any screen unable to show a book page nearly normal-sized will need reformatting, but ePub with its in-line images does not even attempt to retain any formatting.

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1. darkelf

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   06/19, 02:11am | report spam | close reply

   damn

   kurzweil has contributed more to human knowledge and talent than anyone posting here, certainly. whereas Feathers is a useless sack of hate-infused jelly.
   
   still, i don't know that apple is going to be the one which develops the perfect format which will supplant epub (which sucks), pdf (which sucks slightly less), usw. they might embrace it when it finally comes around, though.

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1. efithian

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   06/19, 09:13am | report spam | close reply

   Pain in the a**

   I have written a web based geometry text that was created by hand using html code and is used by mathematics teachers from about 4th grade through grad school. The original format was done in PageMaker (anyone remember) and recently converted to Pages. It was easy to convert the Pages version to pdf, but I have not made that available to others.
   
   I wanted to create an epub version of the text to be placed in the iBook store. The text has over 100 illustrations that were originally created in Illustrator and changed to jpeg/gif for the html version. Changing from pdf to epub was not an easy route, so I changed it from html to epub. This was an absolute nightmare and is still only half finished. The only app that worked well in the conversion was Sigil. It seems like epub output from Pages would do the job, but I am not sure that will ever be possible.

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1. Heinz Doofenshmirtz

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   06/19, 03:26pm | report spam | close reply

   Kurzweil's track record...

   Is poor. Despite his contributions in text to speech, his track record in predicting technology trends and social changes because of technological advances is even worse than random chance. Statistically speaking, he would do better if he simply guessed.
   
   His claims about AI are particularly telling of his inability. For decades now he's been saying things along the line "now that processor X is available, and the increase in computer power it provides, we'll have thinking machines in Y no. of months".
   
   Well, he's been wrong about this time after time after time. Even the most advanced AI devices, with the exception of very specialized applications such as text to speech, are notoriously poor at performing simple cognitive and perceptual tasks. In fact, I would go so far as to say that text to speech isn't a form of AI at all, rather it's simply a process of algorithmic translation of information from written to auditory form. I'll be impressed when a text to speech device can perform it's task and give three different interpretations of a written passage expressed in terms of differences in inflection, accentuation, etc. That would qualify as genuine AI.
   
   As it stands, the best AI systems aren't any better at recognizing shapes and colors and spatial relationships than my two year old daughter is. And, Kurzweil's track record as a "futurist" is abysmal.

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1. Dark Goob

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   Joined: Aug 2001

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   06/20, 05:12pm | report spam | close reply

   Kurzweil's right.

   The iPad lets you change the font size of the book, but that causes repagination. Imagine if you're working with Adobe inDesign or Quark xPress, and you were to change the font size of the entire newspaper all of a sudden. It would destroy your layout. That's what he means.
   
   Think also about poetry books or novels that use indented sections of text, using page placement and the spatial relations of words to each other and the page, not to mention relation to illustrations. This is all destroyed if the user can change the font size.
   
   The solution is easy, however. All you have to do is to have some books where you can publish them as eBooks with "locked typography." That way the user can't muck it up. Simple. But I applaud Kurzweil for bringing this issue to the fore. Someone had to.
   
   Problem with the current iPad is that its screen DPI is too low for a book with 10-point fonts to really be readable. Once the iPad has a Retina Display (over 300 DPI), then we'll be able to have our book and read it too. 10-point fonts will look fine. The question is, how long until such a display is feasible on the iPad, cost-wise, and drivable, GPU-wise? Because that's a h*** of a lot of pixels.

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1. facebook_Ben

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   Joined: Jun 2010

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   06/20, 11:58pm | report spam | close reply

   still think this could be good...

   Kurzweil has thus far proven his effectiveness in delivering meaningful contributions to society. And lets face it...he's dead on about the ineffectiveness of dealing with complex formatting on eReaders. It sucks! There is still a long ways to go when it comes to software that reproduces pre-formatted text in the exact way it was intended to be read.
   
   ccoulson: I think it will be compatible with iPad as Kurzweil intends to have it work with nearly every device.
   
   Anyway, great little post. I've added some of my reactions on my blog: http://ebookreader-ben.com/ray-kurzweil-promises-blio-will-end-your-ereading-troubles/