hankyoreh

May 15. (by Lee Jeong-yong

By Kim Jae-seob, IT correspondent

Park Heung-ho, 51, workhorse of the South Korean software industry, is in the news once again, this time as the president of a developer of e-book reader applications for mobile phones.

Park made his name for going head to head with Microsoft as he oversaw the development of Hangul, a Korean word processor, in the early 1990s, and for releasing Namo Web Editor, a tool that made it possible for laypeople to make their own websites, at the end of the 1990s. Now, Park is stepping up to the plate for a third time with an e-book reader app.

At the age of 50, Park established his company Gitden in a rundown office in the Sadang neighborhood of Seoul and produced the Gitden Reader after two years during which he barely left his desk. The application has shoved aside products by Apple, Google, and Amazon to gain recognition for its world-class quality.

The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), which maintains the electronic publication (EPUB) standard for e-books, published on May 12 the results of its assessment of the compatibility of e-book readers on app stores to the EPUB 3.0 standards. Gitden Reader received the highest score in the assessment.

The IDPF assessed e-book readers from around the world according to 270 criteria. Gitden Reader was number one overall in the mobile category and number three including desktop programs. The reader beat out Apple’s own iBooks app on the iOS, and it surpassed Google’s Play Books in the Android market. It even bested Amazon’s Kindle, a pioneer in the e-book market.

Outstripping all the applications that called themselves the best, Gitden Reader was rated the world’s number one e-book reader app that supports the EPUB standard.

In contrast with EPUB 2.0, which can only display text and images, EPUB 3.0 also has multimedia functionality. With E-book readers that support EPUB 3.0, users can even enjoy music and videos.

But given how broad and complicated the EPUB 3.0 standard is, it is not easy to develop a reader that supports it. Even Gitden Reader only passed 72.9% of the criteria in the assessment. Apple’s iBooks only got 67.3%, and Kobo’s IOS came in at 59.9%.

Park oversaw the development of the Hangul word processing software as a founding member of Hancom, and he established Namo Interactive on his own. It was there that he developed Namo Web Editor.

After his company was listed on KOSDAQ, Park was pushed out in a hostile takeover. The next 10 years were difficult for Park, who spent much of his time reading e-books. It was at this time that his eyes opened to the possibility of e-book readers. He first focused his attention on PDF readers, managing to develop one in only two years.

But he was unable to ignore EPUB 3.0. “At first, I wasn’t even thinking about it, but then I learned that the majority of the EPUB 3.0 standards were based on HTML5, which was made by the World Wide Web Consortium. The thing is, I had experience with HTML5 from back when I was developing the Namo Web editor,” said Park.

Park set up Gitden in 2010 and set to work developing an e-book reader app that supported the EPUB 3.0 standards. The team of developers he brought together was truly a motley crew. He assembled a team of experts that were immensely skilled in developing programs but who had been given the cold shoulder by other companies because their degrees were from provincial or third-rate universities (if they had a degree at all) or who had been rejected by game companies for being too old.

After two years of intense labor, Park and his team created the Gitden Reader. Word of mouth has already carried news about the e-book reader app around the world. It has been supplied to the publishing department of a well-known university in England, and it was also adopted by the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology.

“Since the IDPF published the results of its assessment, we have been getting e-mail inquiries from major universities and publishing companies in other countries, as well as South Korea’s leading mobile phone manufacturers,” said Park.

Park is confident that he can grow Gitden Reader into a platform similar to Kakao Talk, South Korea’s leading mobile messaging application. Not only is there rapid growth in the number of e-book users, but the market for e-textbooks is also opening up.

But in order to do this, it is first necessary to untangle the snarling policies related to the e-textbooks and e-book publishing. “There are around 20 e-book stores in South Korea, and the reader applications are all different. For this reason, publishers have to go to the trouble of adapting their products for each reader every time that they publish a book. Not only that, but South Korean e-book stores don’t accept readers that support EPUB 3.0, so publishers upload e-books that support the EPUB 3.0 standards to the Apple e-book store and upload EPUB 2.0 books to South Korean e-book stores.

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