Microsoft Reader 101
Click here to read in Microsoft Reader.
5 February 2001
Thought I'd talk a little this week about Microsoft Reader. Ebook reading systems abound these days, and I know my regular readers have heard me slam Reader again and again for DRM issues, but honestly, it's my favorite reading system. It has a lot going for it that few other readers have (and none can match point for point):
ClearType: This is the most noticeable benefit, at least to handheld and laptop users. On an LCD screen, Microsoft's ClearType font rendering engine anti-aliases letters at the sub-pixel level. This means that fonts are "smoothed" out by blending pixels with the pixels adjacent to them--so that a pixel diagonally between a black pixel and a white pixel would be gray—but in this case the individual red, green and blue elements of a color LCD pixel can be blended. On laptops, flat-panel desktop screens and some handhelds (unfortunately, the Compaq and Casio devices orient the LCD grid vertically rather than horizontally, making ClearType much less effective), this results in a practical increase in horizontal resolution by a factor of three. Instead of 240 pixels across, it looks like my Jornada has 720. This makes ClearType-rendered screens almost as crisp and clear as print on paper. Click here for more information on ClearType. Clean UI: Microsoft did a lot of research into the mechanics of reading, of how human beings actually read the written word, and then designed their reader accordingly. Microsoft Reader sports a very clean, uncluttered user interface, much like that of a paper book. There's a page number in the upper right, the title of the book in the upper left, and a page of clean, full-justified text. That's it. Pages can be turned by the jog wheel or arrow keys, depending on your device, and that's all there is to it. Compared tot he scroll bar hell of Acrobat, this is unbelievably simple and uncomplicated. Pages and breaks, but reflowable: As mentioned above, Reader uses pages numbers to as closely as possible approximate the experience of reading a paper book. It also allows for real page breaks, at chapter headings, for example. The interesting thing is that unlike PDF, Reader accomplishes this without locking the user into a fixed-page format. Even though the text breaks so that my chapter headings always start a new "page", chapter three will be on a different page number on my handheld than it is on my desktop (which can render more words per page). Bookmarks, annotations, drawings, highlighting and more: Reader supports nearly everything you can do with a paper book when it comes to markup and annotations. You can highly passages, you can circle things, makes notes in your own hand or add a "sticky note" where you can type detailed commentary relevant to a certain passage. And you can, of course, add multiple bookmarks, which are color coded and always visible and colored squares on the side of the page, like the colored tabs people insert into paper books. All annotations are indexed and easily scannable. Word lookup: If you install the freely available Encarta dictionary, you can look up a work in a Microsoft Reader ebook simply by tapping it and selecting "Look up" from the pop-up menu. A window will appear over the text with the dictionary definition of the word. Cover art: I'll admit that I used to think such presentation was just so much fluff. Back in my austere Palm days, I actually liked the idea of reading files in straight ASCII text, with no formatting—italics, headers, etc.—and certainly no cover art. But I have to say that it does make a difference. I have a Microsoft Reader edition of Peter Benchley's Jaws, and it definitely adds something to the experience to actually see the familiar book cover of the giant fish racing up from the deep to engulf the unsuspecting swimmer. Not to mention that the thumbnails of the covers shown in the library view aid in scanning for the book you want to read. Hyperlinks (and TOC): As you'll see below, the Microsoft Reader .Lit format is based on XHTML. As such, it fully supports hyperlinks and a hyperlinked Table of Contents. Free: Microsoft Reader itself, as well as many of the tools used to make .Lit ebooks, is free. It costs nothing to try out. Supported by Microsoft:Whatever you may think of Microsoft, it is the world's largest software company, and it's made a commitment to ebooks. It's a pretty safe bet that neither Reader nor the .Lit format is going away in the foreseeable future.
The .Lit format
Okay, so Reader sounds pretty cool. But what about this .Lit format? What is that?
.Lit is a compiled ebook format based on the Open E-Book standard, itself based on XML and XHTML. A simple OEB publication can be little more than a well-formed HTML document. Reader supports most valid Cascading Style Sheets markup, so that can be used to set page breaks, margins, font sizes, etc. The HTML document is then run through a converter, which adds cover graphics—if any—and compiles the document into a compressed binary form understandable to Reader. This is a simple procedure, but it's one-way. As of this writing, there is no known way of decompiling a Reader ebook back into the component HTML.
DRM issues
The prime reason for that is DRM. Reader was built to be a commercially viable reading system, and in this day and age that means being as secure as possible. .Lit being a read-only format is just the first step down that road. Reader supports three levels of encryption:
The first level is no protection at all, apart of .Lit being a read-only format. Documents can not be modified, but there's nothing to stop free redistribution. All free conversion tools use this level. The next level "brands" the owner's name onto the cover of the book. When you purchase the book, the name on the credit card becomes a permanent fixture on the book, just below the author's name on the front page. There's still nothing to physically stop you from redistributing the book, but since it can easily be traced back to you, you're likely to only give it to close friends. You don't want a book with your name on it floating around the Internet. The last level of encryption is the evil "Owner Restrictive" DRM. This is the one that requires you to "activate" your device, and a book can only be read on activated devices (and you can only have two activations at any one time). This level is also not currently supported on the Pocket PC. While most publishers, scared blind by Napster and paranoid, have decided to go this route, not all have. There are books on Barnes & Noble that use the middle level DRM, and are readable on the Pocket PC, but you have to look for them. Make sure the page for the book specifies that the book is readable on the Pocket PC before you buy it, even if you plan on reading on a desktop or laptop. This guarantees you won't have to deal with the "activation" nonsense.
Of course, there's another way to avoid DRM headaches, and that's to roll your own ebooks. Source material abounds on the Internet, and cover graphics are easy to come by as well. If you want to create your own high-quality Reader editions, how do you do it?
Conversion Options
The easiest way, and the cheapest—if you already have Word 2000—is to download the free converter from Microsoft's web page. This will add a Reader button to your Word 2000 toolbar that will convert your current document into .Lit format. This is intended for casual, personal-use conversions, and is fairly limited, but it works. It doesn't allow you to select cover graphics, and the ones it uses are fairly huge—even a small file, like one of my columns, will end up as a 150+k .Lit file via Word 2000. But if you're just making books for yourself and you don't care too much about presentation or file size, this is the easiest way to create a .Lit file.
(By the way, this only works with Word 2000 because Word '97 can't create the XHTML source files needed for the conversion. The converter first saves the Word document as XHTML, then converts that into .Lit.)
Another free solution is OverDrive ReaderWorks Standard. This is a program that takes in one or more HTML source files and compiles them into a .Lit file. It has more configuration options than the Word converter, and includes a Table of Contents wizard for creating an HTML TOC based on the header tags in your document. It still doesn't allow you to create your own cover graphics, but it does just about everything else you need to create a well-presented Reader file, and the default cover graphics it uses are smaller than those used by Word 2000, resulting in a leaner file size.
Regularly priced at $149 but available now for $69, this allows you to run the gamut on creating ebooks, everything you need to create commercial editions complete with cover art and DRM. I was a little twitchy about spending a hundred fifty on it, but for seventy bucks it's a great deal if you want to create ebooks that you actually want other people to see.
Microsoft has made the SDK freely available, so this is only the beginning. Other companies will start making their products capable of outputting .Lit format—I've heard desktop publishing giant Quark will be doing this soon.
For more information, Jon Noring (founder of the e-book-list mailing list) has recently started a new discussion group on Yahoo groups dedicated to Microsoft Reader.
Jeff Kirvin
jkirvin@yahoo.com
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