As a society, we need an open source device for reading. Books are among the most important documents of our culture, yet the most popular and widespread devices we have for reading — the Kobo, the Nook, the Kindle and even the iPad — are closed devices, operating as small moving parts in a set of giant closed platforms whose owners’ interests are not always aligned with readers’.
The Open Book aims to be a simple device that anyone with a soldering iron can build for themselves. The Open Book should be comprehensible: the reader should be able to look at it and understand, at least in broad strokes, how it works. It should be extensible, so that a reader with different needs can write code and add accessories that make the book work for them. It should be global, supporting readers of books in all the languages of the world. Most of all, it should be open, so that anyone can take this design as a starting point and use it to build a better book.
Whenever someone asks what “putting your money where your mouth is” means, just link them to the Open Book.
One just needs a soldering iron and to write some code? LOL I agree proprietary, walled garden e-readers are a problem but how is this a real solution beyond some niche users? You are just limited to reading public domain/Creative Commons licensed works right? Someone please explain it to me if I am misunderstanding this.
Personally, I prefer good old fashion dead trees for reading… No electricity, toxic batteries, or DRM. One can buy physical books used, borrow from a library, and can pass on to a friend all legally. The original open book project!
Depends. For those of us already sticking to DRM-free stuff (eg. me and my Sony PRS-505, with books from Humble Bundle, StoryBundle, Baen, etc. as well as converted fanfiction), the point is to have something for when carrying along print books isn’t viable for whatever reason.
The Nook and the Kindle are, to the best of my understanding, closed devices. (I’ve never owned either one. I’d call the iPad semi-closed. From an application perspective, it’s very much a closed system but the apps provided support the common formats and it’s pretty simple to move PDFs, epubs, and other formats on to it for reading. But how the heck is a Kobo a closed device? I have an Aura 2, and had the original Aura before that. I sync it with Calibre running from Linux. I have no problem at all putting my books on the device. Yes, there is a Kobo bookstore and I can order books from there if I chose to do so, but I’m not required to do so. Nor am I required to jail break the device or jump through any other hoops. Download a DRM free book and import it into Calibre, plug the Aura into the USB port and send the book to the device. I’d have to do the exact same thing if I built an Open Book. The problem isn’t hardware. The problem is that it’s difficult or impossible to obtain new books that aren’t bound to a closed ecosystem with DRM. I can get around that too but that does require jumping through a lot of hoops and taking some actions that are at best quasi-legal. That problem is not helped in any shape, form or fashion by the Open Book. If you want to build an Open Book, have at it. I support that 100%. It’s a cool project. But it’s not solving some problem with lack of usable ebook hardware devices.
I’ve owned Kindle, Kindle Fire, iPad and even a Windows tablet. Of the set the Kindle Fires are quire useful, quite hackable and as such easily opened to wider uses via 3rd party apps. I also use Calibre as well as the Send to Kindle utility to pretty much get my entire library of digital content on my 8″ or 10″ Kindle Fires.
None of this is really plug and play for a non-technical type, but I suspect anyone wanting to do the same has legitimate needs and the wherewithal to do what is required.
I realise that Fire do not have the battery life of traditional readers or the iPad, but for me with a large technical library full of colourful diagrams and drawings they are irreplaceable. I can do everything I use to do on iPads for 1/5th or less of the price, if I drop of damage one it’s not the end of the world, I don’t have to worry about putting it in an armoured case that increases the thickness 400% or costs almost as much as the device! A side benefit is Amazon’s Syncing document positions across multiple devices is superb, actually I’m finding the new MS Edge facilities for device syncing are also very good. It’s been a major change in usability of all these devices, I can pick up the closest gadget and get right back to wherever I was!
cpcf,
Out of curiosity, what type of content do you have in your library? Is it all DRM-free?
Alfman.
It’s a mix, I’ve had a few minor problems with some DRM, in particular some editions have silly low limits on how many devices you can replicate on. For my way of thinking most of us will need eBooks replicated on four or five devices, usually a desktop, laptop, reader, phone and perhaps a web/cloud service. Some content I’ve purchased only allowed three, but all you can do is respect the request and I’m not one to try and hack a workaround as people need income to generate the content.
One thing you might be interested in, I’ve found different editions of devices treat DRM-Free content differently. For examples having updated regularly I have a few generations of Kindle Fire lying around, some treat DRM Free content as documents, and they do not appear in the book list, while another generation of the same device will show the very same file as a book. I think it’s primarily caused by the evolving DRM license situation, you can almost trace the DRM changes by how different generations of device behave. There is irony in this, because Amazon’s desire to get you to upgrade but not offering updates, effectively leaves unpatched generations of device in the wild as DRM ignorant platforms.
cpcf,
Yeah, there’s a couple different opinions about this. It bothers me when DRM forbids users to do things that are expressly granted by copyright law. For example they don’t have the right to prohibit fair use rights, yet more often than not DRM doesn’t respect our legal fair use rights. I’m legally allowed to open the media on whatever platform I choose without the copyright holder’s consent, however the DRM can prevent me from from being able to do so. Things like that are quite upsetting.
This is doubly upsetting because DRM is rarely if ever 100% effective and the people it bothers the most are the people who actually paid for their copies. One job I had required employees to crawl around under the desk shuffling physical dongles around to open the software. I thought “you’ve got to be kidding me”. I saw (and used) those in the 80s and 90s, but didn’t realize it was still a thing. Those who download illegal copies are rarely debilitated by DRM. I’m only re-hashing an age old debate over the merits of DRM…I don’t expect to break any new ground in discussing it here.
Hopefully you never get locked out of any of your ebooks. I don't own any myself, but I have faced the problem of legit games becoming unplayable due to DRM, which is lousy. Some publishers voluntarily strip the DRM before you loose access, which is something…
https://www.onmsft.com/news/zune-licensing-for-drm-protected-music-ends-soon-but-you-can-upgrade-to-mp3
Steam has said they would do this, but it still bothers me that a company holds the keys to copies that I legally own.
ddjones,
That’s true. Having an open book is a cool milestone, but DRM tends to ruins everything. Even on android god forbid you are a power user and need root access or need to run an android fork. Google along with vendors punish you for taking advantage of open source to its fullest, grr.
Yes it’s a hidden reality of digital media, when we buy a real book we expect it will probably last our lifetime, and that is an assumption Joe Average takes on digital media but of course that is highly unlikely. I recall a project in Australia years ago to formulate a digital archive that was DRM free and platform independent.
Reading Thom’s summary my immediate response was cynical. There’s plenty of hardware to read books on, so is open e-book hardware really needed? Then I clicked on the link, and it’s hard not to be impressed; this is very neat. I think if I built one of these my offline reading consumption would go up considerably (not because it would be more convenient, but because I’d get a bigger kick out of reading).
This is a very interesting idea, but its implementation is very unlikely because people often use reading devices, namely: Kobo, Nook, Kindle and even iPad. Personally, I also read books through Nook, all because it’s very convenient. Now I read a lot of interesting essays about the American dream on https://papersowl.com/examples/american-dream/ and it is thanks to Nook that this process becomes simple and possible anywhere. Therefore, your idea is interesting, but its implementation and competitiveness are in question.