Beyond The PC:
New Devices For Our Users
Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
Acknowledgments
UKOLN
This talk is informed by
University of Bath the work of Sarah Ormes,
Email UKOLN‟s Public Library
B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk Networking Focus from
URL 1995 - March 2001
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
UKOLN is supported by:
Contents
• Historical Perspective
• The E-Book – What Is It?
• Publishing For The E-Book
• Conclusions
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Devices
A history of computer devices
Old Current Emerging
Paper tape PC WAP
Punch card Macintosh E-Book
Terminal Unix / Linux Digital TV
VDUs workstations PDAs
Graphics Kiosks
terminal Laptop (for students)
Micro (e.g. BBC, {Wireless LANs /
Sinclair) Bluetooth}
Failures?
X Terminals Futures
NCs (Network Watches
Computers) Wearables
Thin Clients Electronic ink (eink.com)
…
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Lessons
Marketplace
• Need to be aware of marketplace developments:
PC as winner / NC as failure / Mac as niche market
• New products and apps are appearing rapidly
– and are disappearing too! (dot.com collapses)
Avoidance of proprietary lock-in
• Avoid being locked into a device (cf BBC Micro CBL
applications; dongles for PC software; etc.)
• Free readers aren‟t enough (cf browser plugins)
• Royalty-free licences aren‟t enough (cf GIF)
Standards
• Support for standards essential to:
Minimise locking dangers
4 Allow resources to be reused
Current
We‟ve been here before. So what is so
different today?
• Information hungry society (multiple TV channels,
email lists, SMS messages, voice mail, …)
• Pervasive networking … coming in UK (e.g. free
network access from PCs in shopping malls in
Hong Kong)
• Demand from a computer literate student intake
(Nintendo generation)
“Where can I read my email?” - typical question for the
academic at a conference. The answer is now not just
the conference‟s PC facility‟s but laptop / PDA + mobile
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phone / landline / wireless LAN
Benefits
Thin Clients
• Pass on capital and supports costs to students!
• Tried and failed at Warwick (laptop policy)- but
students are buying mobile phones and PDAs anyway
Mobile Access
• Providing access from home /from anywhere will:
Minimise transport costs, ease congestion, etc.
Minimise demand on institutional facilities
Offline reading should be a good thing,
and it‟s desirable to facilitate this
“I'm a real fan of eBooks - particularly
Specialist Requirements because they are easier to hold than a
• People with disabilities book! I have a spinal injury and I have
read more books in the last 6 months
that the previous 6 yers”
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New Devices
What devices may students be interested in?
E-Book
PDA
Mobile Note: The
Palm VX Hybrid
Franklin
£329 at PC World Siemens
Ebookman from
€644 eBookman €359
Argos costs
Hybrid phone, Hybrid e-book,
£169
MP3 player MP3 player & PDA
and PDA Images from
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What Else Is An E-Book?
An e-book is:
• A trendy name for any old resource on the Web
• A resource (often large
and book-like if printed)
which is encrypted
• A resource stored in
an e-book format,
which is designed for
reading on small devices
• Name of device used to
read files in e-book format
Confusion over terminology
can make it possible to
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make incorrect decisions
Exploiting The New Devices
Issues:
• Procurement and management of the devices:
IT services do hardware procurement and
manage PC clusters, but who will lend out
the devices?
Do IT services negotiate preferred deals,
and leave users to buy?
• Procurement and management of the content:
Clearly a task for the library?
• Publishing your own content:
Let‟s not forget this
cf. the Web – initial interest in finding
content, now in publishing
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Exploiting The New Devices
Researcher
• Plugs mobile device into desktop machine and
downloads W3C Web site for reading on train /
at home over weekend
• Uses intelligent agent to find relevant resources
from e-print archives and downloads to mobile
device for reading on train journey (with
unpredictable journey time)
Student
• On Friday evening in student bar, a friend
mentions some useful reading resources. She
takes out her mobile device and, using the
Student Union‟s wireless network, she
downloads the resources
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E-Book Format Wars
PDF Derivative
• Based on Adobe‟s PDF format
• Well-established, well-used
• Proprietary, and based on appearance
rather than structure
XML Derivative
• Based on XML
• XML is now well-established
• Open standards, ands , being based based on
document structure, supports re-purposing
“My Proprietary Format”
• Other companies muscling in, and making an
attractive offer to convert your documents
to their locked format
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Proprietary Formats
Warnings:
• Dangers of
proprietary
formats
• Difficulties in
reuse of
resources
• Difficulties in
managing
browser
plugins
How does Davtel's proposed e-book solution work?
The publisher sends the book in any electronic format to
a 3rd party storage company, where it will be translated
to our format free of charge.
http://www.tboook.com/faq3.shtml
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Peace In Our Time
There has been:
• Recognition of the
dangers of format wars
• Agreement between the
two main camps
• Adoption of XML :-)
• See OeB (Open eBook
Forum) Web site
But there will still be issues about
the development and deployment
of the standards – and, no doubt,
battles still to be fought
(cf WML developments for WAP)
Note also AAP „standards‟ work in rights management, metadata and numbering –
13 see
Creating An E-Book
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Viewing
Here is what the the
HTML resource looks
like using an e-book
emulator
E-ditorial
This file was created using
the E-ditorial software.
What is an e-book?
“A simple explanation would
be to say that an e-book is a
self-running computer
program - an executable file.”
i.e. this is a proprietary
format!
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See .
Another Creation Tool
Drag and drop a Web resource
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A Better Way
Is this ease of creation desirable:
• It‟s easy to create a HTML page
• It‟s easy to update Web pages to HTML 4/XHTML
• It‟s easy to create a PDF version
• It‟s easy to create a WAP site
• It‟s easy to make use of Flash
• …
Is this true?
If you have a large Web site to maintain and
wish to support multiple devices (some which
may not take off) you will have to use an
automated approach to content management
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Resource Reuse
You should store your resources in a neutral,
richly-structured format (ideally XML)
XHTML
XML Local script /
Database WML
CMS /
XSLT Transformation
E-book
format
Can you think of any good reasons
for storing your resources in a
Are:
proprietary format,•withprovide encryption & security
To limited PDF
scope for reuse?outsource the digitisation
• To
• To get fancy bells and whistles Print
good enough reasons?
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Conclusions
To conclude:
• There are lots of new devices arriving which
appear to have great potential for use in education
• Inevitably some devices and formats will fail to
gain acceptance (remember BetaMax!)
• Avoid proprietary lockin:
Dangerous if you choose a failure (Betamax)
Dangerous if you choose a winner (Microsoft)
• Management of e-book resources is important,
and likely to involve IT services and Librarians
• Creation of e-book resources also important, and
should form part of an institution‟s IT strategy
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