One of the file formats which has been added to Gutenberg is mp3! At first I thought: “Hey, how cool that people would read stuff aloud and record it for posterity!” but after downloading one I was amazed to find out that it is in fact (at least the “Dracula” mp3 is) a recording of synthesized speech. ie a computer program reading the text aloud in a boring [although fairly intelligible]mechanical voice. This seems particularly stupid to me, since one needs a computer to access and play these things, why the hell bother saving these massive files in the first place. I seriously wonder why someone 5 years down the track would download and listen to mp3 files of text-to-speech circa 2002 when there will be better text-to-speech technology then anyway. What a boring rant.

Grumpy

Sorry but I’m a bit annoyed because here I am thinking that certain applications are just about ready to go online again, when I realize that there will be problems running under 2000 and XP because of user privileges. Basically to keep things simple I have been commonly storing application specific data in the same folder as the application itself. It turns out this is actually illegal if you aren’t logged in with administrator (or at least Power User) privileges. What this would mean is that settings would not be saved under some circumstances, and this is clearly a problem.

So now I’ve got to go through all my apps and make sure they put data in the properly sanctioned place (C:\Windows\Application Data or similar). This includes log files etc, which are going to be much harder for a novice to find now, as they will no longer be stored along side the executable. There are good reasons to do it this way I admit, but I’m not going to bother mentioning them here ;)

Anti-competitive ebook formats

I wonder if I am the only one who thinks it stinks that even out-of-copyright texts are being published in Microsoft’s proprietary *.lit format instead of an open format based on the “Open Ebook” specification. If *.lit was a totally in-house format then I wouldn’t find this so offensive (eg Adobe’s pdf is nothing like oeb). But the real crummy thing about *.lit is that it IS BASED ON OEB! According to MS’s own documentation! So what they are doing is taking a format which many groups have contributed to, and then wrapping it up in an encrypted proprietary wrapper, so no one else can read it. Generally I’m not an MS basher (I use windows after all) but sometimes they really are scum-bags. All we need is for an open format called *.oeb to be made known and for MS Reader content creation tools to be able to output it as well as *.lit (should be technically fairly straightforward). Then other vendors (like me) can write software that supports OEB. I could attempt to support it now, but the problem is that if no one else does then no content will be produced for it, so there’s not much point.

There is still a big place for the plain text version I think, since most texts require no special formatting, but if BookReader in it’s current form becomes at all popular, then it might be a good platform to try to launch a proper open oeb compliant format, but that’s a pretty big IF right now, since no one has even seen BookReader. The sooner a reader is available for reading these generic files the better the chance they will be readable by everyone. One nice thing about OEB is that it’s based on XHTML, which is basically a strict version of HTML conforming to XML syntax. This is good news for someone who has already seen enough of the problems which the sloppiness of HTML can create.