So, without evaluating pros and cons, starting from the most basic/most common, what are the options? This is a summary takes information from Garrish and Gulling, EPUB 3 Best Practices, OReilly 2013, (which I take to be authoritative and also as an example of best practice with regard to the metadata in the epub file) as well as the EPUB 3.0 Publications and Content Documents specifications. Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

1. Simple Dublin Core

Within the OEPBS directory of an unpacked EPUB3 is the content.opf file. It pretty much equates to the manifest of an IMS Content Package. The top-level element is <package> and <metadata> is a required first child of <package>.

The default metadata vocabulary is the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES, simple DC), with prefix dc:. Three elements are mandatory–title, identifier and language–others are optional. For example, in /OEPBS/content.opf

<?xml version=’1.0’ encoding=’UTF-8’?>
<package xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/ [...]">
    <metadata>
        <dc:identifier>urn:isbn:9781449325299</dc:identifier>
        <dc:title>EPUB 3 Best Practices</dc:title>
        <dc:language>en</dc:language>
        <dc:rights>Copyright © 2013 Matt Garrish and Markus Gylling</dc:rights>
[...]

2 Other metadata schemas

The package element has a prefix attribute that may be used to declare prefixes for metadata schemas other than DCMES. Four vocabularies are reserved, i.e. the prefix may be used without a declaration: dcterms, marc, onix and media (the vocabulary used for EPUB3 media overlays). Example

<dcterms:title>EPUB 3 Best Practices</dcterms:title>

Other vocabularies may be used providing a prefix and a URL in a way so similar to xmlns that is makes you wonder why they didn’t just use xmlns.

<package prefix="prism: http://prismstandard.org/namespaces/basic/3.0/" [...]>

3 the meta element

If used without the refines attribute (see below) the meta element can provide information about the package as a whole, e.g.

<meta property="dcterms:title">EPUB 3 Best Practices</meta>

I have no idea what would be the benefit of this over <dcterms:title>.

4 Refining metadata elements: id attribute and the meta element

The id attribute can be used to provide an identifier any element in the metadata that it may be refined. One example of this is mandatory, i.e. that one occurrence of the dc:identifier element must be the publication identifier:

<dc:identifier id="pub-identifier">urn:isbn:9781449325299</dc:identifier>

In general the refinements are described using the meta element with the refines attribute and a property attribute that specifies the nature of the refinement. It’s kind of like RDF reification. The default vocabulary for the property attribute includes “file-as” – an alternative string for a name to be used when filing, “identifier-type” – a way to distinguish between different identifiers, “meta-auth” – the authority for a given instance of metadata, “title-type” – which of the six forms of title being provided.

<dc:creator id="1234">Matt Garrish</dc:creator>
<meta refines="#1234" property="file-as" id="5678">Garrish, Matt</meta>
<meta refines="#1234" property="role">Author</meta>

Terms from other vocabularies may be used for “property” so long as a prefix is declared.

Refinements may have ids and so may be refined.

<meta refines="#5678" property="meta-auth">Phil Barker</meta>

So and so you can make statements about your metadata statements to you heart’s content (though including the whole of the linked data graph in each epub would be silly).

The scheme attribute may be used to identify the controlled vocabulary from which the meta element’s value is drawn. For example, if the identifier is a DOI (which in onix is apparently entry 06 of codelist 5) you can have

<dc:identifier id="pub-id">urn:doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2008.03.001 </dc:identifier>
<meta refines="#pub-id"
      property="identifier-type"
      scheme="onix:codelist5">06</meta>

Or, using the marc relator value Aut to specify author

<meta refines="#1234" property="role" scheme="marc:relators">Aut</meta>

5 Sub-package level metadata

The id attribute may be used to provide an identifier of an subelement of <package> or any element in the XHTML content documents, down to a span element around a phrase, word or character. So a chapter may have id=”chap1″ then we can use meta elements in the metadata to describe it seperately from the rest of the epub

<meta refines="#chap1" property="prism:contentType">bookChapter<meta>

6 Links to metadata records

The link element is an optional, repeatable subelement of <metadata>, “used to associate resources with a publication, such as metadata records” The metadata may be within package or anywhere on the www.
Example

<link rel="marc21xml-record" href="pub/meta/nor-wood-marc21.xml" />
<link refines="#chap1" rel="ex:schema_org-record"
      media-type="application/ld+json"
      href="http://example.org/nor-wood-lrmi.json" />

Metadata embedded in the XHTML5 content

As far as I can see the EPUB3 specs are mute on metadata in HTML of the content documents, e.g. as html:meta elements or as microdata or RDFa, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why one should not put metadata here. I wouldn’t expect any EPUB system to look that deeply into the package but it would be a good approach to helping the metadata travel with the resource if the EPUB is disaggregated and passed into a non-EPUB3 CMS.

The technology-will-revolutionise-education approach runs the risk of alienating the people who you most need on your side if that revolutionary change is to be an improvement, that is the teachers and students. I remember we used to talk about technology as a Trojan Horse for introducing pedagogic improvement in HE, something that I stopped doing when I went to a presentation where the speaker pointed out that the Trojan Horse was an act of war in the context of a bloody siege, and perhaps that isn’t the way learning technologists should approach teachers. More importantly, introducing technology probably isn’t the best way to approach improving education. Introducing technology is not straightforward, it will take attention away from other matters: whatever the initial intent, it will distract from thinking about teaching and learning. If you want to improve education you should focus on that and probably not do something else that is really difficult in it’s own right at the same time.

So the start-with-something-familiar approach has an advantage here in that it simply focuses on planting a technology with higher potential into existing practice. The risk is that substiution is seen as as all that needs to be done, or that requirements that arise from this objective are over prioritised. For example, I have seen requirements for page-faithful display (i.e. the ability to reproduce on the ebook reader exactly what would be on paper) and page numbers as requirements for etextbooks. They may be desirable for marketing purposes, and there are real functional requirements relating to how content is presented and how it may be referenced, but building-in these restrictions as requirements would, in my view, be a mistake. Let’s have a strategy where we aim to embed but with a view to enhancing.

The path forward suggested for the US by the Educause/Internet 2 pilot etextbook pilot. Start with a basis aimed at increasing adoption and move forward to improvements in functionality and transformation.
Image from Grajek, Susan, Understanding what higher education needs from e-textbooks: an EDUCAUSE/Internet2 pilot (Research Report), EDUCAUSE July 2013.

I am presenting a session at Alt-C 2013 entitled Into the Mainstream? New developments in eTextBooks next month where I hope to discuss ideas like this.

The package metadata of an ePub can include a selection of Dublin Core elements and terms. These can be refined, for example you may have two dc:title elements with refinements to specify that one is the main title and the other the subtitle. You can also extend with elements from other XML namespaces, or if you prefer you can just link to a metadata record of your favourite flavour which can be either inside the ePub package or elsewhere on the web. Any of this metadata can relate to the eBook as a whole or some part of it, e.g. a single chapter or image. Without going into details there seems to be enough scope there to experiment with how educational characteristics of the eBook might be described.

But how to see the results? I took an ePub (a copy of O’reily’s EPUB 3 Best Practices, since it seemed likely to provide as good a starting point as I was going to find in a real book), made a copy, unzipped it and changed the values of the meta elements so that I could easily identify what elements were being displayed. For example I changed
<dc:title id="pub-title">EPUB 3 Best Practices</dc:title> to
<dc:title id="pub-title">dc:title</dc:title> and so on.

Here’s a list of the metadata elements in that file:

• <dc:title id="pub-title">
• <dc:creator id="..." >
• <dc:publisher>
• <dc:date>
• <meta property="dcterms:modified">
• <dc:identifier id="pub-identifier">
• <dc:language id="pub-language">
• <dc:contributor> (repeated)
• <dc:rights>
• <dc:subject>
• <dc:description>
• <meta id="meta-identifier" property="dcterms:identifier">
• <meta property="dcterms:title" id="meta-title">
• <meta property="dcterms:language" id="meta-language">
• <meta property="dcterms:rights">
• <meta property="dcterms:rightsHolder">
• <meta property="dcterms:publisher">
• <meta property="dcterms:subject">
• <meta property="dcterms:description>
• <meta id="...." property="dcterms:creator"> (repeated, different ids)
• <meta name="cover" content="cover-image"/>
• <meta property="ibooks:specified-fonts">

I then looked at this with various eBook readers:

Readium

I had hopes for Readium since it is pretty much the reference implementation of EPUB3. It displayed

in Readium

• dc:title
• dc:creator
• dc:publisher
• dc:date
• meta dcterms:modified
• dc:identifier

Note that it doesn’t even check for a valid value for dates.

Calibre

Calibre, while it doesn’t claim to support ePub3 is targetted at managing personal book libraries. It displays:

in Calibre

• dc:title
• dc:creator
• dc:subject (for tags)
• dc:description
• dc:publisher

It probably uses dc:language and dc:date (for published) as well but recognises that the values dc:language / dc:date aren’t valid.

Ideal Reader for Android

The Ideal Reader for Android is the other ePub3 reader I use. It displays

In Ideal Android Reader

• dc:title
• meta dcterms:creator (just one of them)
• dc:date
• dc:publisher
• dc:description
• dc:subject
• dc:rights

iTunes

Finally I gave a chunk of diskspace to Apple

in iTunes desktop for Windows 7

• dc:title
• dc:creator
• dc:title (again)
• dc:subject (in the info tab, as Genre)

Yep, title is there twice: the info tab shows dc:title in the Name and Album fields, so you can gauge the amount of effort that Apple have put into adapting iTunes for books.

What did I learn?

I learnt that none of the ePub reading/management apps or tools that I have show more than the bare minimum of metadata, even if it is there. None of them will be much good for trying out ideas for how educationally characteristics can be described since I strongly suspect that none of it will be viewable. That’s not too surprising, especially when you consider that none of the tools I looked at are geared around resource discovery, but I can’t really go uploading dummy ePub files to book seller sites just to see what they look like. May be any meaningful exploration/demonstration of educational metadata in ePub is going to need a bespoke application, but if you know of a tool that might be helpful do drop me a line.

Changing paradigms

With the earliest printed books, or incunabula, such as the Gutenberg Bible, printers sought to mimic the hand written manuscripts with which 15th cent scholars were familiar; in much the same way as publishers now seek to replicate printed books as ebooks.

We need to treat digital content as offering new possibilities and requiring new ways of working. This might be uncomfortable for publishers (some more than others) and there was some discussion about how we cannot assume that all students will naturally see the advantages, especially if they have mostly encountered problematic content that presents little that could not be put on paper but is encumbered with DRM to the point that it is questionable as to whether they really own the book. But there is potential as well as resistance. Of course there can be more interesting, more interactive content–Will Russell of the Royal Society of Chemistry described how they have been publishing to mobile devices, with tools such as Chem Goggles that will recognise a chemical structure and display information about the chemical. More radically, there can also be new business models: Lorraine suggested Institutions could become publishers of their own teaching content, and later in the day Caren Milloy, also of Jisc Collections, and Brian Hole of Ubiquity Press pointed to the possibilities of open access scholarly publishing.

Caren’s work with the OAPEN Library is worth looking through for useful information relating to quality assurance in open monograms such as notifying readers of updates or errata. Caren also talked about the difficulties in advertising that a free online version of a resource is available when much of the dissemination and discovery ecosystem (you know, Amazon, Google…) is geared around selling stuff, difficulties that work with EDitEUR on the ONIX metadata scheme will hopefully address soon.

Brian described how Ubiquity Press can publish open access ebooks by driving down costs and being transparent about what they charge for. They work from XML source, created overseas, from which they can publish in various formats including print on demand, and explore economies of scale by working with university presses, resulting in a charge to the author (or their funders) of about £150 for a chapter assuming there is nothing to complex in that chapter.

eTextBooks

All through the day there were mentions of eTextBooks, starting again with Lorraine who highlighted the paperless medic and how his quest to work only with digital resources is complicated by the non-articulation of the numerous systems he has to use. When she said that what he wanted was all his content (ebooks, lecture handouts, his own notes etc.) on the same platform, integrated with knowledge about when and where he had to be for lectures and when he had exams, I really started to wonder how much functionality can you put into an eContent platform before it really becomes a single-person content-oriented VLE. And when you add in the ability to share notes with the social and communication capability of most mobile devices, what then do you have?

A couple of presentations addressed eTextBooks directly, from a commercial point of view. Jenni Evans spoke about Vital Source and Andrejs Alferovs about Kortext both of which are in the business of working with institutions distributing online textbooks to students. Both seem to have a good grasp of what students want, which I think should be useful requirements to feed into eTextBook standardization efforts such as eTernity, these include:

• ability to print
• offline access
• availability across multiple devices
• reliable access under load
• integration with VLE
• integration with syllabus/curriculum
• epub3 interactive content
• long term access
• ability for student to highlight/annotate text and share this with chosen friends
• ability to search text and annotations

Discovery

There was also a theme of resource discovery running through the day, and I have already mentioned in passing that this referenced Google and Amazon, but also social media. Nick Canty spoke about a survey of library use of social media, I thought it interesting that there seemed to be some sophisticated use of the immediacy of Twitter to direct people to more permanent content, e.g. to engagement on Facebook or the library website.

Both Richard Wallis of OCLC and Robert Faber of OUP emphasized that users tend to use Google to search and gave figures for how much of the access to library catalogue pages came direct from Google and other external systems, not from their own catalogue search interface. For example the Biblioteque Nationale de France found that 80% of access to their catalogue pages cam directly from web search engines not catalogue searches, and Robert gave similar figures for access to Oxford Journals. The immediate consequence of this is that if most people are trying to find content using external systems then you need to make sure that at least some (as much as possible, in fact) of your content is visible to them–this feeds in to arguments about how open access helps solve discoverability problems. But Richard went further, he spoke about how the metadata describing the resources needs to be in a language that Google/Bing/Yahoo understand, and that language is schema.org. He did a very good job distinguishing between the usefulness of specialist metadata schema for exchanging precise information between libraries or publishers, but when trying to pass general information to Google:

it’s no use using a language only you speak.

Richard went on to speak about the Google Knowledge graph and their “things not strings” approach facilitated by linked data. He urged libraries to stop copying text and to start linking, for example not to copy an author name from an authority file but to link to the entry in that file, in Eric Miller’s words to move from cataloguing to “catalinking”.

ebooks?

So was this really about ebooks? Probably not, and the point was made that over the years the name of the event has variously stressed ebooks and econtent and that over that time what is meant by “ebook” has changed. I must admit that for me there is something about the idea of a [e]book that I prefer over a “content aggregation” but if we use the term ebook, let’s use it acknowledging that the book of the future will be as different from what we have now as what we have now is from the medieval scroll.

Picture Credit
Scanned image of page of the Epistle of St Jerome in the Gutenberg bible taken from Wikipedia. No Copyright.

The stakeholders present represented many perspectives from throughout Europe: publishers, publishing industry specification bodies (e.g. IPDF who own EPUB3, and DAISY), national bodies with some sort of remit for educational technology, and elearning specification and standardisation organisations. I gave a short presentation on the OER perspective.

Many issues were raised through the course of the day, including (in no particular order)

• Interactive and multimedia content in eTextbooks
• Accessibility of eTextbooks
• eTextbooks shouldn’t be monolithic and immutable chunks of content, it should be possible to link directly to specific locations or to disaggregate the content
• The lifecycle of an eTextbook. This goes beyond initial authoring and publishing
• Quality assurance (of content and pedagogic approach)
• Alignment with specific curricula
• Personalization and adaptation to individual needs and requirements
• The ability to describe the learning pathway embodied in an eTextbook, and vary either the content used on this pathway or to provide different pathways through the same content
• The ability to describe a range IPR and licensing arrangements of the whole and of specific components of the eTextbook
• The ability to interact with learning systems with data flowing in both directions

If you’re thinking that sounds like a list of the educational technology issues that we have been busy with for the last decade or two, then I would agree with you. Furthermore, there is a decade or two’s worth of educational technology specs and standards that address these issues. Of course not all of those specs and standards are necessarily the right ones for now, and there are others that have more traction within digital publishing. EPUB3 was well represented in the meeting (DITA is the other publishing standard mentioned in the eTernity documentation, but no one was at the meeting to talk about that) and it doesn’t seem impossible to meet the educational requirements outlined in the meeting within the general EPUB3 framework. The question is which issues should be prioritised and how should they be addressed.

Of course a technical standard is only an enabler: it doesn’t in itself make any change to teaching and learning; change will only happen if developers create tools and authors create resources that exploit the standard. For various reasons that hasn’t happened with some of the existing specs and standards. A technical standard can facilitate change but there needs to a will or a necessity to change in the first place. One thing that made me hopeful about this was a point made by Owen White of Pearson that he did not to think of the business he is in as being centred around content creation and publishing but around education and learning and that leads away from the view of eBooks as isolated static aggregations.

For more information keep an eye on the eTernity website

In the last few years, however, there has been an increasing stream of stories about ebooks outselling printed books by some measure or another. For example, in August 2012 it was widely reported that Amazon in the UK had sold more ebooks than hard- and paperbacks combined[1]. Although there is of course often an element of advertising hype in many of these stories, they do reflect a real shift in the popularity of ebooks.

Various visions of ebooks
This shift has largely been prompted by two developments in ebook readers: the Amazon Kindle and Apple iPad, with associated apps. In technical capabilities neither is unique. Arguably, they are not even innovative as they both do no more than bring together pre-existing technologies. Nevertheless they do represent major initiatives that demonstrate their technical potential. Interestingly, they also represent somewhat opposing visions of what an ebook is.

The Amazon Kindle is by far the most successful representative of a range of devices that adopt the approach of trying to deliver the same content as a book, in as convenient a manner as possible while maintaining the ease of reading. The emphasis is on cheap, lightweight e-readers that allow owners to carry all they could desire to read without too much thought or effort. The minimal size and weight allow the Kindle to be no more of a burden to carry than a small paperback. The screen is designed so that the reading experience is similar to that of paper, rather than that of a computer screen. The memory capacity and network connectivity are designed so that owners need never run out of material to read and need never worry about syncing content with their computers. The battery life typically extends to days of use, so owners need rarely be worried about charging the device. The emphasis is on the text, so that design elements such as font, colour, and layout may be lost. This represents one of the potential drawbacks of the Kindle approach in education since the layout of many textbooks is carefully designed to enhance the explanation being presented through choice of colour, boxed explanations of concepts as asides, or (especially in technical subjects) complex tables and equations. It is important to recognise that many of the news stories concerning the explosion of ebooks relate to the Amazon Kindle and to linear texts (such as novels) read for pleasure, rather than complex material designed for study.

Not surprisingly ( given Apple’s history of an emphasis on good-looking, well-designed products and a target market of customers who appreciate such things), Apple’s ebooks designed for the iPad (iBooks) place greater value on the appearance of the printed page. Apple’s iBooks can support full-colour, high-fidelity representations of a printed original. The iPad is capable of displaying the original look of historical manuscripts such as mediaeval bestiaries or the original handwritten and illustrated copy of Alice in Wonderland (and other rare books held by the British Library). While maintaining some of the convenience of the Kindle approach, Apple’s approach requires greater computing power, at a cost of increased weight and price — and decreased battery life. With this greater computing power also comes the opportunity toChallenges of ebooks in academic contexts go beyond what can be displayed on the printed page. An image on a printed page has to be static, whereas hardware such as the iPad allows moving images and interactive 3D models to be displayed, offering a potentially rich educational experience.

Challenges of ebooks in academic contexts
One of the challenges facing Higher and Further Education is how to respond to these possibilities. Does interactive content that can be brought into the classroom by students change the role of the course textbook? Does the facility of even the modest Kindle for sharing comments and annotations among readers allow new ways of discussing a text? Are there deep-seated human factors surrounding the way that students study, which cannot be satisfactorily replicated by ebooks and could even impede learning when using them? For example, such factors include: making notes, annotations and bookmarks; jumping around a textbook rather than reading it sequentially cover-to-cover; having several books open at one time; or just the plain familiarity of the paper-based format as compared to software navigation that has to be learnt. It does seem clear from studies so far that students in general will not welcome ebooks unless there is some clear advantage to be gained by their use[2].

There are other challenges. The change in publishing brought about by ebooks represents a challenge to publishers. It is noticeable that none of the developments in ebooks (from Project Gutenberg through to the Kindle and the iPad) have come from publishers. They are challenged by the change in publishing that ebooks represent. Typically, publishers are challenged by the difficulty of producing content for novel and varied platforms. Such interoperability issues are accentuated by the desire of some to push the interactive capabilities of ebooks as far possible (and these capabilities are important to education). Publishers are also challenged by the way that digital content changes the way in which material can be distributed and copied. This is a problem that they pass on to libraries: in essence an ebook may be “lent” out by a library numerous times without degradation or loss of availability to others, whereas a paper book can only be lent out to one person at a time and will eventually fall apart. As a result, in order to protect their income, publishers seek to limit what libraries can do with books by limiting the rights that libraries buy when they purchase a book, and by enforcing those rights through Digital Rights Management technology. Alternatively, publishers will need to redefine what libraries purchase, moving from a transfer of ownership of a copy to something more akin to rental or subscription to a service. These changes impinge on libraries’ scope for action in Higher Education.

As with any other technology in education, there are still many barriers and challenges that exist and these need to be overcome for ebooks to be adopted more widely in Higher and Further Education. This report introduces some key concepts related to ebooks in general and discusses the technical, cultural and legal challenges that need to be addressed for the successful adoption of ebooks in education. Furthermore, it also offers scenarios showing effective use of ebooks in libraries and in teaching and learning across institutions. It provides us with useful insights into the future directions of ebooks development.

footnotes
1. See, for example, this August 2012 report in The Guardian of Amazon’s announcement that “for every 100 hardback and paperback books it sells on its UK site, 114 ebooks are downloaded”.

2. For commentary on recent research into university student attitudes toward and usage of etextbooks, see this August 2012 article: “Students Find E-Textbooks ‘Clumsy’ and Don’t Use Their Interactive Features” The Chronicle of Higher Education, online . For more in-depth summary of this research, see also:Internet2 eTextbook Spring 2012 Pilot Final Project Report (1 August 2012).

Phil Barker & Li Yuan, JISC CETIS, September 2012

To kick off, Ken Chad defined eBooks for the purpose of the workshop, and I guess the report to be delivered by the project, as anything delivered digitally that was longer than a journal article. I’ll come back to what I think are the problems with that later, but we didn’t waste time discussing it. It did mean that we included in the discussion such things as scanned copies of texts such as those that can be made under the CLA licence, and the difficulties around managing and distributing those.

With the earliest printed book, or incunabula, such as the Gutenberg Bible, printers sought to mimic the hand written manuscripts with which 15th cent scholars were familiar; in much the same way as publishers now seek to replicate printed books as ebooks.

The issues raised in discussion included rights clearance, the (to some extent technical, but mostly legal) difficulties of creating course packs containing excerpts of selected texts, the diversity of platforms and formats, disability access, and relationships with publishers.

It was really interesting that accessibility featured so strongly. Someone suggested that this was because the mismatch between an ebook and the device on which it is displayed creates an impairment so frequently that accessibility issues are plain for all to see.

A lot of the issues seem to go back publishers struggling with a new challenge, not knowing how they can meet it and keep their business model intact. It was great to have Suzanne Hardy of the PublishOER project there with her experience of how publishers will respond to an opportunity (such as getting more information about their users through tracking) but need help in knowing what the opportunities are when all they can see is the threat of losing control of their content. Whether publishers can make the necessary changes in currently print-oriented business processes to realise these benefits was questioned. Also there are challenges to libraries in HE, who are used to being able to buy one copy of a book for an institution whereas publishers now want to be able to sell access to individuals–partly, I guess, so that they can make that link between a user and the content they provide, but also because one digital copy can go a lot further than a single physical copy.

Interestingly, the innovation in ebooks is coming not from conventional publishers but from players such as Amazon, Apple and from publishers such as O’Reilly and Pearson. (Note that Pearson have a stake in education that includes an assessment business, online courses and colleges and so go beyond being a conventional publisher.) Also, the drive behind these innovations comes from new technology making new business models possible, not from evolution of current business, nor, arguably, from user demand.

So, anyway, what is an ebook? I am not happy with a definition that includes web sites of additional content created to accompany a book, or pages of a physical book that have been scanned. That doesn’t represent the sort of technical innovation that is creating new and interesting opportunities and the challenges come with them. Yes there are important (long-standing) issues around digital content in general, some of which will overlap with ebooks, but I will be disappointed if the report from this project is full of issues that could have been written about 10yrs ago. That’s not because I think those issues are dead but because I think ebooks are something different that deserves attention. I’ll suggest two approaches defining to what that something is:

1. an ebook is what the ebook reading devices and apps read well. By-and-large that means content in mobi or ePub format. Ebook readers don’t handle scanned page images well. They don’t read most pdf well (though depends on the tool and nature of pdf used, but aim of pdf was to maintain page layout which is exactly what you don’t want on an ebook reader). Word processed files are borderline but mostly word processed documents are page-oriented which raises the same issue as with pdfs. In short WYSIWYG and ebooks don’t match.

2. an ebook is aggregated content, packaged so that it can be moved from server to device, with more-or-less linear navigation. In the aggregation (which is often a zip file under another extension name) are assets (the text, images and other content that are viewed) plus metadata that describes the book as a whole (and maybe the assets individually) and information about how the assets should be navigated (structural metadata describing the organisation of the book). That’s essentially what mobi and ePub are. It’s also what IMS Content Packaging and offspring like SCORM and Common Cartridge are; and for that matter it’s what the MS Office and Open Office formats are.

I had a short discussion with Zak Mensah of JISC Digital Media about whether the content should be mostly text based. I would like to see as much non-text material as is useful, but clearly there is a limit. It would be perverse to take a set of videos, sequence them one after another with screen of text between each one like a caption frame in a silent movie, and then call it a book. However, there is something more than text that would make sense as a book: imagine replacing all the illustrations in a well-illustrated text book with models, animations, videos … for example, a chemistry book with interactive models of chemical structures, graphs that change when you alter the parameters; or a Shakespeare text with videos of performance in parallel with text…that still makes sense as a book.

[image of page from Gutenberg Bible taken from wikipedia]

The potential of text and data mining is probably well understood in technical circles, and were well articulated by JohnMcNaught of NaCTeM. Briefly the potential lies in the extraction of new knowledge from old through the ability to surface implicit knowledge and show semantic relationships. This is something that could not be done by humans, not even crowds, because of volume of information involved. Full text access is crucial, John cited a finding that only 7% of the subject information extracted from research papers was mentioned in the abstract. There was a strong emphasis, from for example Jeff Lynn of the Coalition for a digital economy and Philip Ditchfield of GSK, on the need for business and enterprise to be able to realise this potential if it were to remain competetive.

While these speakers touched on the legal barriers it was Naomi Korn who gave them a full airing. They start in the process of publishing (or before) when publishers acquire copyright, or a licence to publish with enough restriction to be equivalent. The problem is that the first step of text mining is to make a copy of the work in a suitable format. Even for works licensed under the most liberal open access licence academic authors are likely to use, CC-by, this requires attribution. Naomi spoke of attribution stacking, a problem John had mentioned when a result is found by mining 1000s of papers: do you have to attribute all of them? This sort of problem occurs at every step of the text mining process. In UK law there are no copyright exceptions that can apply: it is not covered by fair dealling (though it is covered by fair use in the US and similar exceptions in Norwegian and Japanese law, nowhere else); the exceptions for transient copies (such as in a computers memory when readng on line) only apply if that copy has not intrinsic value.

The Hargreaves report seeks to redress this situation. Copyright and other IP law is meant to promote innovation not stifle it, and copyright is meant to cover creative expressions, not the sort of raw factual information that data mining processes. Ben White of the British Library suggested an extension of fair dealling to permit data mining of legally obtained publications. The important thing is that, as parliament acts on the Hargreaves review people who understand text mining and care about legal issues make sure that any legislation is sufficient to allow innovation, otherwise innovators will have to move to those jurisdictions like the US, Japan and Norway where the legal barriers are lower (I’ll call them ‘text havens’).

Thanks to JISC and the SCA on organising this event; there’s obviously plenty more for them to do.

I’ve been disappointed since then: the most widely adopted applications of technology in teaching and learning are to use them to project presentations instead of transparencies on an OHP, and as VLEs to distribute course info and handouts. In both example the net impact of the computer is to do the same thing in a slightly more convenient way. Now a platform has reached maturity that allows a slightly more convenient way to read books, reproducing the text-on-paper experience. It’s bound to be the next big thing.

So, what to do about this? Admit that in practice technology will enhance learning by making small incremental improvements to established practice? Press for enhanced capability where it will facilitate good pedagogy? Work in anticipation of some revolutionary change driven by factors outwith the HE system?

In the meantime, some relevant stuff elsewhere:

An open e-Textbook usecase, our contribution to the ISO/IEC JTC1 SC36 Study Period on e-Textbooks.

Digital Textbooks, a blog devoted to documenting significant initiatives that relate to any and all aspects of digital textbooks, most notably their use in higher education.

Wolfram assistants the sort of good stuff that could find its way into a digital text book.

Amazon Kindle customer review on the bad stuff: problems with footnotes in academic eTexts.

Like many standardization efforts, progress is slow and gradual so it’s difficult to know when it’s worth giving an update. But last week the RAMLET technical editor, Scott Lewis sent this message about the conceptual model:

This standard has taken a long time, but it is a complex standard that presents an ontology for resource aggregation and down-loadable files to help implement the ontology.

The good news is that virtually all of the technical work has been done for the standard and for a series of IEEE recommend practices that will be published after the standard is published. The working group expects to have a draft of the base standard for internal review by year’s end and a balloting draft submitted to IEEE in Q1 of 2010. The series of recommended practices that specify mappings for IMS CP, ATOM, METS, MPEG-21 DID, and OAI-PMH ORE will be published as soon as possible after the standard is published. Again, the technical work for these recommend practice has been done, and it is just a matter of converting that work to IEEE recommended practices after the base standard has been approved.

CETIS’s Wilbert Kraan is taking part in the RAMLET work, working on a proof of concept implementation using standard open source components.