OpenReader Discusses Palm OS and Mac OS X Support

The OpenReader Consortium has addressed some of the fears about Palm OS support raised by Richard at eBook Culture and myself. Here is the response on Teleread Blog and here is the response from OpenReader. I really must commend both for the quickness and openness of their replies, it speaks very well of them and their dedication.

I do understand having limited resources and having to set priorities. But, I also think Mac OS X laptops are going to be gaining popularity on college campuses so OS X support is important if etextbooks are ever going to take off. Palm support remains important for reading fiction. I do think it will all sort itself out, especially since the folks at OpenReader are aware of it. The good thing about open source is that others can contribute without getting to entangled in copyright and patent issues.

I have to echo Richard's observation:

"Although OpenReader probably won't directly support the Palm OS until v3.0 at least, they will make it as easy as possible for users to convert OpenReader files to Palm formats. Two possiblities mooted for conversion formats are Plucker and the commercial Mobipocket."

Unless it is very easy, non-tech savvy people just will not use it.

Fortunately, I have Plucker on both my Mac and Palm, which I downloaded for evaluation a few months ago. I will have to dust them off and play around. I'm not tech savvy enough to really understand what the XML of OpenReader entails, but if there is an easy way to convert OpenReader XML to HTML then both Plucker and iSiloX ought to be able to convert it easily and both of those compilers have Mac OS X versions. At least it looks like it might be acceptable as a temporary workaround.