ePUB is a revolution in scholarly publishing. We explore BioMedCentral’s offering.

Scholarly publishing is one of the least enlightened industries of this century. Retail, travel, entertainment, medicine, democracy, and much more have all either been completely changed or show the potential. Yet scholarly publishing idolises the print image (PDF) coupled to a mark of esteem (Journal Impact Factor) as worth paying 3000 USD for 10 pages. It’s absurd to argue that humans were born to read double column PDF on landscape screens and it’s the pinnacle of graphic presentati0on. It’s not. And the idea that readers love the variety of different presentational brands from journals – this is only done for the marketers, not the readers.

Now some publishers are starting to use a new format, ePUB. BioMedCentral have pioneered this (let me know of others) http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/bmcblog/2012/12/11/biomed-central-now-publishes-in-epub-format/ . This deserves much more praise and use than I think it has had, and I’ll explain why.

I, and I suspect many other readers/consumers, hate the way that science is presented by scholarly publishers. My remarks apply to almost all publishers, independently of whether they are “open access” or not. Simply, no publishers care much about their readers. There are three main approaches – some publishers have only one – some have all three.

• PDF – a sighted-human-only format. Its proponents argue it’s beautiful. But it’s inaccessible to machines and unsighted humans and scholarly publishing produces the worst technical PDF I have come across. It’s taken me a year to build a system to read it semantically and we’re not finished. It cannot adapt to different needs – size of screens, lack of eyes, etc. It has no place in modern science. Its continued use is a severe discouragement to any form of innovation in communication.
• HTML. This was designed by TimBL to be a simple, powerful, way of communicating science. And it is. I can do almost anything I want with HTML. It interoperates with markup languages, SVG, etc.

  Except when it’s created by most scholarly publishers. Much of their HTML cannot be formally read. Here’s a typical example of total garbage (slightly truncated):

  <meta name=”dc.description” content=”The increase in … with a technique we call ” range=”” modulation”.=”” with=”” modulation,=”” sobp.”=””>
  

What’s happened is that the original HTML had a quoted section. Something like:

The increase in … with a technique we call “range modulation”. With modulation …

The publisher – or more accurately the contractor they have outsourced to – uses a garbage toolkit. There’s a standard way to treat quotes (&quot;)and it’s been used for 20 years. It’s actually easier to produce conformant HTML than garbage. And there are zillions of free tools. But the crap above crashes all the HTML parsers I have used.

People have paid for this – maybe thousands of dollars. Libraries should cancel/reduce subscriptions. Authors should refuse to pay APCs. If a garage fills your brake fluid reservoir with screenwash they can be prosecuted. But no one cares about the quality of publishing.

• XML. This is the engineering solution. It’s useful for people who want to re-use the content. Perhaps for content-mining. Perhaps for a different presentational approach. Perhaps for computation (e.g. Maths). Perhaps for data (chemistry). It’s routinely provided by PubMed (EuropePMC). Because NIH have a commitment to accuracy and quality the XML is of good quality. Publishers often re-offer the XML, but much of that is probably limited to Biomedical. (Most publishers use XML internally, but they don’t publish it because they don’t want readers having free access to something useful that they can be charged extra for).

So now we have ePUB. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB . Potentially ePUB takes us a giant step forward. HTML suffers because while it is good at representing semantic and document structure, and can be repurposed, it’s terrible as a container format (you cannot easily distribute images with HTML). Conversely PDF has no semantics and cannot be repurposed, but is a tolerable container format for images.

ePUB supports both of these. It’s a standard format (ZIP) that contains a series of components (HTML, images, XML, etc.). It’s SVG friendly (which in itself can revolutionise science). So I have downloaded a sample from BMC and started to analyse it. If a publisher WANTS the reader to read the content, then it’s a good start. For publishers who do not want people to read their output and (even worse) reuse it, it’s a major threat. (except – salvation – by DRM we can stop anyone reading it). (When we see the first DRM’ed ePUBs we’ll know it’s 1984).

Here’s the example (http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/epub/1471-2105-14-172.epub). [It won’t do anything in your browser unless you have an epub reader, but it’s easy to do this in Mozilla – and I suspect others (see https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/epubreader/ and chrome://epubreader/locale/welcome.html ).

• Go to the webpage where you want to download the ePub file and click on the download link. If you already downloaded the ePub file to your PC, just open it via the “File/File open” menu or drag the file on the Firefox window.
  
• Now EPUBReader starts working: it downloads/opens the ePub file, uncompresses it and does some other processing. At the end it will present you the ready to read ePub file immediately!
  
• EPUBReader created a page where all the ePub files, you downloaded/opened, are listed. You can open this page at four locations:
  
  • EPUBReader added a bookmark to this page called “ePub-Catalog” which you can find at the end of your bookmark list.
    
  • You find a new menuitem in your Firefox “Tools” menu, called “ePub-Catalog”.
    
  • You can add a button to your Firefox toolbar. If you use Firefox 4.0 or later, the button has been added automatically.
    
  • When you are reading an ePub-file, you find a button in the bottom toolbar.
    

If you want to have more information about EPUBReader, please read the manual or the FAQ.

Enjoy it!

Here’s the display. It fits the screen precisely. No vertical scrolling required. Horizontal scrolling, because we’re on a horizontal device. No need for typesetting!!

Isn’t that already a zillion times better than PDF? Yes, so why don’t you demand it?

But that is only 10% of the value of ePUB and I’ll discuss that in a later post.