Monday, April 5, 2010

David Frum on the iPad

I posted this note over at his "forum".
The eBook mobile device has a few challenges: one is the rejection of commercial formats by the free-software movement. The MIT web formatting language CURL (www.curl.com) was spun-off as a company and so got no traction: but it offers a great deal more than PDF. It is more than just text and imaging: we need options to comapre versions/editions/translations and options to interpolate footnotes or side-pane footnotes and to link to eTexts from footnotes and options for our marginalia, notes and annotations. Microsoft OneNote 2007 on a netbook is about the best thing at the moment.


A thinking person's eBook viewer is NOT a web browser. I ahve some notes on the topic over at aule-browser.com

Other formats include Djvu, Daisy, JBig2, MobiPocket, Plucker

EPub is basically just a ZIP file

The Curl format is a much richer alternative to HTML5 or the Literature Markup Language due to the availability of macros and user-defined formats.

Another long-shot: www.rebol.com or www.rebol.net with the arrival of Rebol3

The most neglected way to index and explore text: ICON as in arizona.edu/ICON or ObjectIcon at code.google.com (from the folks who brought SNOBOL to the humanities.)

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