Open eBook Forum Announces New Initiatives
Posted on October 6, 2000
The Open eBook Forum (OeBF), an international trade organization for epublishing, has announced a framework and two initiatives to further accelerate the growth of the epublishing marketplace. The organization is launching a standards coordination initiative to bring together standards development activities in the ebook and epublishing worlds. Additionally, the organization described its new requirements gathering and harmonizing initiative, part of its strategy for providing continued leadership in critical areas like digital rights management (DRM).
At its quarterly Work Summit, held in association with eBook 2000 (hosted by NISO and NIST) last week in Washington, D.C., the OeBF released a critical component of both of these initiatives. The document, called ``A Framework for the Epublishing Ecology,'' was released for public comment and contains an overview, reference model, and glossary to facilitate ongoing standards work in DRM and other areas of the epublishing world. The framework is available from the Open eBook Forum's website at http://www.openebook.org/framework.
``We expect these initiatives and our framework to provide measurable standards to lead DRM and other electronic publishing initiatives and solutions to meet the needs of authors, publishers, libraries, end-users and others invested in the ebook market,'' stated David Ornstein, President of the Open eBook Forum.
A major component of the standards coordination initiative will be quarterly technical coordination workshops at which representatives of related standards bodies will meet to coordinate development activities. Early invitees include representatives from the Digital Audio-based Information System (DAISY) initiative, the EBX Working Group (EBX), the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), NISO, W3C, DocBook, the International Publisher's Association, MPEG, the U.S. Copyright Office, the Association of American Publishers, the international DOI foundation, EDItEUR and others.
``Over the past few months, we've been hearing concerns about fragmentation in the ebook standards world,'' said Ornstein. ``Bringing all the parties together has always been a central goal for the OeBF and we think that standards coordination and cooperation are critical for the development of the ebook market we all envision. We're very excited to be able to provide a technically-focused, policy-neutral meeting ground with these workshops and we look forward to broad participation.''
A planning meeting for the coordination workshops will be held in conjunction with this year's Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany. Coordination workshops will be hosted by the OeBF and held at least quarterly in conjunction with the OeBF's Quarterly Work Summits including Summit2 (Denver, CO, the week of December 4th, 2000) and Summit3 (Paris, France, in conjunction with the Paris Book Fair, March 16-21).
``The OeBF invites and expects these workshops to provide a platform for relevant standards efforts to find common ground for the benefit of this industry,'' said Ornstein. ``This provides a forum for us to seek the benefit from work conducted by other groups including, among others, W3C, NISO, IDF, AAP, the DAISY Consortium, EBX, ONIX and others.''
At the Summit, the OeBF also announced that it would continue its DRM efforts by gathering and harmonizing the requirements needed for the successful growth of the epublishing marketplace. As part of the Forum's new efforts and working groups, all industry stakeholders (authors, publishers, technology providers, services providers, book sellers and consumers) will be invited to participate in a unified requirements gathering process.
``The Electronic Book Exchange Working Group (EBX) sees the OeBF's initiatives as a positive development for epublishing. We are pleased to work with the OeBF in these activities to help ensure that our specification is developed to meet the requirements of a broad constituency.'' stated EBX Vice Chair Steve Mooney.
The Open eBook Forum (OEBF) is an international, non-profit trade organization with over 100 members. The Forum's mission is to promote the development of a thriving ebook market.