Andy Weissberg, VP at Bowker, kicks off the third annual NISO/BISG Forum.

Get ready to get educated. With ebooks finally generating a profound impact in the digitial publishing world, the third annual NISO/BISG Standards Forum was a welcome sight for librarians, publishers, and content providers dealing with the challenges that ebook creation, distribution, and use is having on the marketplace. The big news from this session is that great minds are making sense out of the growing world of digital content. So go ahead. Try to imagine what the library or publishing world would be like without ISBNs. And then appreciate the work being done behind the scenes in negotiating DRM (digital rights management), fear of format death, open access, and piracy.

As Marydee Ojala mentioned in her previous post about ALA acronyms, this forum titled E-books: The Changing Standards Landscape provided plenty of alphabet-soup options: Let’s start with the two key organizers of NISO (National Information Standards Organization) and BISG (Book Industry Study Group). After the 3.5-hour session, I was all the wiser about the need for standards to make sense out of this fast-growing sector and why everyone in the supply chain should be working with the same identifiers. 

The session, sponsored by Swets and ExLibris, ushered in a series of eight experts who took the standards issue to an all-new level and from myriad angles: Todd Carpenter, managing director at NISO; Andy Weissberg, VP at Bowker; Mark Bide, executive director at EDItEUR; Michael Smith, executive director of International Digital Publishing Forum; Michael Healy, executive director at BISG; Suzanne Kemperman, director at OCLC NetLibrary; John Cox, managing director at John Cox Associates; and Sue Polanka, head of reference and instruction at the Paul Laurence Dunbar Library at Wright State University. 

Weissberg stressed the importance of facilitating the exchange of information in every point of the supply chain. The goal, he says, is to optimize discovery and improve the collections. He considers the newly approved ISO standard of the ISTC (International Standard Text Code) as a “gateway,” a trigger for databases to talk to each other in the hardcover, softcover, ebooks, and audiobooks arena. With the ISTC, it’s possible to group products containing the same content or even different content with the same origins.

For Smith, the definition of ebook has been greatly simplified to “a downloadable digital file.” And there’s plenty happening in the ebook space these days. “Ebooks have been the ‘next big thing’ for the past 10 years,” he says, “and after multiple letdowns over the years, they’re finally here.” He says that XML-based file format will ease the transition and improve the discovery process.

 For Kemperman, piracy continues to be a big concern, noting that “[the Association of American Publishers] estimates losses to U.S. book publishers at $531.5 million in 2007 due to piracy.” How do we find the balance between letting information be free and keeping publishers alive?

The road ahead is filled with twists and turns as ebook devices evolve and users’ love of ebooks accelerate. For more on the standards issue, stay tuned for another in the series of NISO webinars on Aug. 12^th.

 –Barbara Brynko
Editor-in-Chief
Information Today