Chris Hayes speaks with Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle and Library Futures co-founder Kyle Courtney about why megapublishers are suing to redefine e-books. as legally different from paper books.

Could the future of libraries as we’ve known them be completely different? Our guests this week say so. Megapublishers are suing the Internet Archive, perhaps best known for its Wayback Machine, to redefine e-books as legally different from paper books. A difference in how they are classified would mean sweeping changes for the way libraries operate. Brewster Kahle is a digital librarian at the Internet Archive. Kyle Courtney is a lawyer, librarian, director of copyright and information policy for Harvard Library. He’s the co-founder of Library Futures, which aims to empower the digital future for America’s libraries. They join to discuss what’s animating the lawsuit, information as a public good and the consequences should the publishers ultimately prevail.

July 9, 2024

https://www.ebooksforus.com/

2023-12-21 BookBridge Talk, 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M-nfWI93nY. Andy Matuschak and Derrek Chow

Amazon's .kfx ebook format and predecessors are extensions of html5, css and backwards compatible with mobipocket (the 2000 French proprietary format that Kindle bought and used).

Proprietary format.

The W3C standard for Epub ebooks. Nav [[How Standard Ebooks serves millions of requests per month with a 2GB VPS; or, a paean to the classic web - Alex Cabal]]

https://web.archive.org/web/20240104082611/https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-tech

first published #2022/02/11

Apart from the framing of this post more as an apology than as a show of strength of keeping things simple and sturdy, interesting nuggets: Epub ebooks are xhtml and static so rapidly served without the need for a fancy framework or even a database. Flat texts are small, and their current collection fits in RAM entirely. PHP is used without frills. All in all a strong call to keep things simple, and to embrace my current use of php for local tools too: it's very fast.

Also makes me wonder: #openvraag what can one do with Epub books outside an ebook reader, in terms of excerpting e.g. and ripping things out for re-use elsewhere. I've got loads of them on my laptop

https://standardebooks.org/collections/encyclopaedia-britannicas-great-books-of-the-western-world

https://archive.org/details/standardebooks?tab=about

https://standardebooks.org/

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>awarm.space</span> in Making a modern ebook with Standard Ebooks (<time class='dt-published'>08/02/2021 12:08:19</time>)</cite></small>

目前有6万多本书籍可供下载，大多为版权过期而进入公有领域的书籍。

Sisto, M.C. Publishing and Library E-Lending: An Analysis of the Decade Before Covid-19. Pub Res Q 38, 405–422 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-022-09880-7

Q.: How can users access the OPDS catalogue?

A.: OPDS catalogue URL http://yoursite.com/feed/opds.

```js const axios = require('axios'); const epub = require('epub-gen');

axios.get('http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2701/2701-0.txt'). then(res => res.data). then(text => { text = text.slice(text.indexOf('EXTRACTS.')); text = text.slice(text.indexOf('CHAPTER 1.'));

const lines = text.split('\r\n');
const content = [];
for (let i = 0; i < lines.length; ++i) {
  const line = lines[i];
  if (line.startsWith('CHAPTER ')) {
    if (content.length) {
      content[content.length - 1].data = content[content.length - 1].data.join('\n');
    }
    content.push({
      title: line,
      data: ['<h2>' + line + '</h2>']
    });
  } else if (line.trim() === '') {
    if (content[content.length - 1].data.length > 1) {
      content[content.length - 1].data.push('</p>');
    }
    content[content.length - 1].data.push('<p>');
  } else {
    content[content.length - 1].data.push(line);
  }
}

const options = {
  title: 'Moby-Dick',
  author: 'Herman Melville',
  output: './moby-dick.epub',
  content
};

return new epub(options).promise;

}). then(() => console.log('Done')); ```

This appendix is informative

All examples use the same hypothetical publication of Alice in Wonderland, and are given in the collection structure with a single annotation.

• Commentary Annotation on Publication with URI json-ld { "@context": "http://www.idpf.org/epub/oa/1.0/context.json", "@id": "http://example.org/epub/annotations.json", "@type": "epub:AnnotationCollection", "annotations": [ { "@id": "urn:uuid:E7E3799F-3CD5-4F69-87C6-5478B22873D6", "@type": "oa:Annotation", "hasTarget": { "@type": "oa:SpecificResource", "hasSource": { "@id": "http://www.example.org/ebooks/A1B0D67E-2E81-4DF5/v2.epub", "@type": "dctypes:Text" } }, "hasBody": { "@type": "dctypes:Text", "format": "application/xhtml+xml", "chars": "<div xml:lang='en' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>I love Alice in Wonderland</div>", "language": "en" }, "motivatedBy": "oa:commenting" } ] }

• Commentary Annotation on Publication without Identifying URI json-ld { "@context": "http://www.idpf.org/epub/oa/1.0/context.json", "@id": "http://example.org/epub/annotations.json", "@type": "epub:AnnotationCollection", "annotations": [ { "@id": "urn:uuid:E7E3799F-3CD5-4F69-87C6-5478B22873D6", "@type": "oa:Annotation", "hasTarget": { "@type": "oa:SpecificResource", "hasSource": { "@type": "dctypes:Text", "uniqueIdentifier": "isbn:123456789x", "originURL": "http://www.example.com/publisher/book/", "dc:identifier": "urn:uuid:A1B0D67E-2E81-4DF5-9E67-A64CBE366809", "dcterms:modified": "2011-01-01T12:00:00Z" } }, "hasBody": { "@type": "dctypes:Text", "format": "application/xhtml+xml", "chars": "<div xml:lang='en' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>I love Alice in Wonderland</div>", "language": "en" }, "motivatedBy": "oa:commenting" } ] }

• Collection Metadata json-ld { "@context": "http://www.idpf.org/epub/oa/1.0/context.json", "@id": "http://example.org/epub/annotations.json", "@type": "epub:AnnotationCollection", "dc:title": "Alice in Wonderland Annotations", "dc:publisher": "Example Organization", "dc:creator": "Anne O'Tater", "dcterms:modified": "2014-03-17T12:30:00Z", "dc:description": "Anne's collection of annotations on Alice in Wonderland", "dc:rights": [ { "@value": "Quelques droits en Français", "@language": "fr" }, { "@value": "Some Rights in English", "@language": "en" } ], "annotations": [ { "@id": "urn:uuid:E7E3799F-3CD5-4F69-87C6-5478B22873D6", "@type": "oa:Annotation", "hasTarget": { "@type": "oa:SpecificResource", "hasSource": { "@type": "dctypes:Text", "uniqueIdentifier": "isbn:123456789x", "originURL": "http://www.example.com/publisher/book/", "dc:identifier": "urn:uuid:A1B0D67E-2E81-4DF5-9E67-A64CBE366809", "dcterms:modified": "2011-01-01T12:00:00Z" } }, "hasBody": { "@type": "dctypes:Text", "format": "application/xhtml+xml", "chars": "<div xml:lang='en' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>I love Alice in Wonderland</div>", "language": "en" }, "motivatedBy": "oa:commenting" } ] }

• Annotation with Ancillary Resources in the Zip json-ld { "@context": "http://www.idpf.org/epub/oa/1.0/context.json", "@id": "http://example.org/epub/annotations.json", "@type": "epub:AnnotationCollection", "annotations": [ { "@id": "urn:uuid:E7E3799F-3CD5-4F69-87C6-5478B22873D6", "@type": "oa:Annotation", "hasTarget": { "@type": "oa:SpecificResource", "hasSource": { "@type": "dctypes:Text", "uniqueIdentifier": "isbn:123456789x", "originURL": "http://www.example.com/publisher/book/", "dc:identifier": "urn:uuid:A1B0D67E-2E81-4DF5-9E67-A64CBE366809", "dcterms:modified": "2011-01-01T12:00:00Z" } }, "hasBody": { "@type": "dctypes:Text", "format": "application/xhtml+xml", "chars": "<div xml:lang='en' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>I love Alice in Wonderland! <img src='/imgs/heart.jpg'/></div>" }, "motivatedBy": "oa:commenting" } ] }

• Styling of Selection

json-ld { "@context": "http://www.idpf.org/epub/oa/1.0/context.json", "@id": "http://example.org/epub/annotations.json", "@type": "epub:AnnotationCollection", "annotations": [ { "@id": "urn:uuid:E7E3799F-3CD5-4F69-87C6-5478B22873D6", "@type": "oa:Annotation", "styledBy": { "@type": "oa:CssStyle", "format": "text/css", "chars": ".red { border: 1px solid red; }" }, "hasTarget": { "@type": "oa:SpecificResource", "hasSelector": { "@type": "oa:FragmentSelector", "value": "epubcfi(/6/4[chap01ref]!/4[body01]/10[para05]/3:10)" }, "hasSource": { "@type": "dctypes:Text", "uniqueIdentifier": "isbn:123456789x", "originURL": "http://www.example.com/publisher/book/", "dc:identifier": "urn:uuid:A1B0D67E-2E81-4DF5-9E67-A64CBE366809", "dcterms:modified": "2011-01-01T12:00:00Z" }, "styleClass": "red" }, "hasBody": { "@type": "dctypes:Text", "format": "application/xhtml+xml", "chars": "<div xml:lang='en' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>I love this part of the text</div>", "language": "en" }, "motivatedBy": "oa:commenting" } ] }

• Replying to an Annotation json-ld { "@context": "http://www.idpf.org/epub/oa/1.0/context.json", "@id": "http://example.org/epub/annotations.json", "@type": "epub:AnnotationCollection", "annotations": [ { "@id": "urn:uuid:B81AF8C4-B04A-4D3D-B1D3-23F7C02E56BB", "@type": "oa:Annotation", "motivatedBy": "oa:replying", "hasTarget": "urn:uuid:E7E3799F-3CD5-4F69-87C6-5478B22873D6", "hasBody": { "@type": "dctypes:Text", "format": "application/xhtml+xml", "chars": "<span xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>I agree!</span>" } } ] }

Example :

• Namespace declaration in the feed element (in our example, we use the prefix « pse » ):

xml <feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" xmlns:pse="http://vaemendis.net/opds-pse/ns" xmlns:opds="http://opds-spec.org/2010/catalog" xml:lang="en" xmlns:opensearch="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/" >

• Additional link in an entry to allow page by page access to the document :

xml <link rel="http://vaemendis.net/opds-pse/stream" type="image/jpeg" href="/opds-comics/stream/1217?page={pageNumber}&width={maxWidth}" pse:count="35" />

• Feedbooks : http://fr.feedbooks.com/catalog
• Atramenta : https://www.atramenta.net/opds/
• Gallica : https://gallica.bnf.fr/opds
• Ebooks Gratuits : https://www.ebooksgratuits.com/opds/
• Archive.org : http://bookserver.archive.org/catalog
• Projet Gutenberg : http://m.gutenberg.org/ebooks/?format=opds
• Framabookin : https://framabookin.org/

Nice to see this laid out. I've never seen a general overview of how this system works for libraries.

I've always wondered what it cost my local public library to loan me an e-book whether I read it or not.

Guide how to download ebooks via IRC

As it happens, this annotation works through its proper URL) but, Hypothesis butchered the link. You need to turn the page once to see the highlight though.

EKT is part of the HIRMEOS project to bring standards and common tools (including annotation) to ebooks--starting with 5 platforms in humanities and social sciences. More here.

Etexts have an advantage in the annotation department in that they're not limited to the marginal space. Annotations can be as lengthy as they need to be. They can also be organized through tags, and thus easily searched. They can contain hyperlinks and be hyperlinked, tying texts together. I wonder how many people are taught, in any meaningful or systematic way, to use digital texts. And if they were, how would that change this dilemma.

Some may be surprised to hear about OERs in a post about proprietary technology, especially since this was before iBooks Author allowed the creation of ePUB3 books.

Though it’s described in such a simple way, there might be hidden power in adding these tags, especially when we bring eBooks to the Semantic Web. Though books are the prime example of a “Web of Documents”, they can also contribute to the “Web of Data”, if we enable them. It might take long, but it could happen.

On top of the whole debate between native apps and the Open Web, there’s a debate between apps and books. We might not reach the “Write Once, Publish Everywhere” dream, but there’s something to be said about having building blocks which are easy to adapt to different contexts.

Leaving the door open for eBooks? IDPF is part of the coalition after all and there are important connections with work done on ePUB3.

No ePub?

statistics from this ALA special report

from DigitalBookWorld July 24, 2014

by Matt Enis Jan 14, 2014

Price, Gary. "OverDrive Releases 2014 Year-End Usage Statistics Including Most Popular eBooks and Audiobooks." Library Journal 8 Jan 2015. "From an OverDrive announcement" FIled by Gary Price.

Like what? OverDrive?