RE: Fooled again! eBooks and truth in labelling

At 6:05 PM -0500 2/9/08, you wrote:
>Dublin Core is used as part of the Open Ebook specification. It's embedded
>in the .OPF package that describes the files that make up the ebook. As an
>example:
>

Thanks for the example. I'll have to review it in detail.


>You may be conflating two purposes. One is labeling the ebook within the
>ebook. The other is sales information needed by a reseller.


I agree that the two purposes have been conflated. Jon Jermey's original post on this subject was about information available on a retail basis. My comments were meant to talk about communicating information from publishers to retailers and others. I didn't intend anything about information imbedded in the digital document.



>The labeling of the ebook would not necessarily contain pricing information
>because it is subject to change.


Well, I guess that depends on how the information is used and how the industry develops. An analogy might be seen in the bar code on books today -- many bookstores insist on the bar code including the list price information and/or that the cover of the book list the price. It saves them from having to price the book themselves, and customers seem to want to be able to see the publisher's price.

Its not a perfect analogy by any means -- I'm not sure how customers would need to see (or even be able to see) the information labelled in an ebook. But it might demonstrate how price information could end up in such a labeling.
 


><snip>
>Labeling for a reseller to include price and other information should refer
>to an online link. Early in the DOI.org initiative (Digital Object
>Identifier) they had the right idea of allowing each manufacturer a prefix
>for their books. In the example above the DOI prefix is 10.1125 which is
>common for Baen. The manufacturer could add whatever url info he likes after
>the prefix to point to the documentation for that book. Then the info could
>be retrieved with a http call like <DOI://10.1125/Baen.067172052X>DOI://10.1125/Baen.067172052X to get the
>book, <DOI://10.1125/Baen.067172052X/list>DOI://10.1125/Baen.067172052X/list to get the sales info etc. The DOI
>organization was to maintain a database of referrals that would take an URL
>as above and redirect it to whatever the manufacturer had setup on his site
>to handle it.
>
>DOI was a nice idea and Baen bought a prefix. Only The DOI people sold out
>to the ISBN people effectively destroying the basic idea.
>


This is closer to the idea I was referring to. I believe this is a needed role. It is too bad that the Bowker registration system is charging for it the way they are. If you only need one DOI, $250 setup and $500 a year is quite expensive. Of course, Bowker is assuming that publishers using DOIs will have 1000s of digital objects to identify.

Bowker is simply the US registrar, just as it is for ISBNs. Other registrars for other countries handle this differently. The ISBN registrar in Canada, for example, gives ISBNs out for free.

I admit the above is about all I know about the DOI. But IMO, we need something to fill this need.

Perhaps we need a replacement for the DOI.

Kent



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