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I never heard of it, but it seems interesting. The spec is straightforward, royalty-free, non-proprietary, and is basically a bunch of standards put together. The content of .epub books is just XHTML and CSS. However, I can't find any free software that can specifically work with epub.

The dark side to it is that it uses the OEBPS Container Format (OCF) for metadata. OCF reserves a "rights.xml" ("restrictions.xml" would be more apt) for storing DRM information. That means when you see a .epub file you won't know if it is defective or not without closer inspection, which may not be possible.

I guess PDF is the same way. The spec has some very trivial DRM built in, but other people have managed to hack some DRM on top of it, so any given PDF may also be defective.

I'd really rather see an ebook format analogous to Ogg, where adding DRM really isn't possible.

If it's not .epub, they're not very good. Why? It's industry accepted, prevalent open-standard for ebooks. Even Adobe uses it over .pdf.

Actually, I will add one thing...

"You have an early industry mindset. Up until a couple of years ago, there hasn't been a device that could replace a book. This thing is just getting started."

No, I don't have an early industry mindset. I have a present-day industry mindset. And, funnily enough, you're repeating pretty much exactly what people were saying back in 2000.

I right now use e-books for free advertising. If you go onto my website, you'll find an e-book sample of the opening of every new book I've published, and a full e-book of each reprint (there's one right now, but more are coming). So, I don't ignore e-books at all - I make active use of them.

However, the e-book market share is too small for it to be worth my time as a small publisher to take the considerable effort required to reformat these books for the Kindle. And I check up on the market share every couple of months. If the e-book gets up to 10% or higher of the market share, it will become worthwhile for me to start producing commercial e-books.

There's nothing backwards about doing stuff this way. You're talking in sweeping terms about massive changes to a market that not only have not happened, but have been predicted before and failed to happen. And there are indicators that can be used to track this - in the time that the Kindle was available, the e-book market grew steadily (it has actually been doing that since they were brought out), but very slowly in comparison to the rest of the book market.

Now, let's look at some actual stats here. Doing a search, I've been able to pull e-book net sales figures from 2002 to 2008. Please note, the Kindle was released at the end of 2007:

http://www.openebook.org/doc_library/industrystats.htm

Okay, so the release of the Kindle may have an impact on the sales - there is certainly a change in the sales rate as of the beginning of 2008 (of course, correlation is not causation, and there are other e-book readers that were released at the same time). The sales rate increased over the course of 2008. So, consumption certainly increased. All this means that the e-book is a growing market.

The question lies in what will happen now. The release of the Kindle 2 may help push sales further, but I want to point out a trend in the sales figures - after each growth spurt, there has been a flattening out and sometimes a drop - this happens in 2005, and it happens in 2007. So, past history suggests that sometime in 2009 or 2010 there will be another flattening out and possible drop.

Let's do some number crunching. What were the actual growth rates between these quarters for 2008? Doing the math, we get:

Q1: 23%
Q2: 15%
Q3: 20%
Q4: 21%

So, the highest growth in the past 5 quarters has been between Q4 2007 and Q1 2008. Otherwise, the growth is hovering at between 15-21%. That's nothing to sneeze at, but that's far from taking over the industry in the next ten years. And, as I said, we've seen a 4 month period of growth followed by a flattening out before.

Now, the point I'm trying to make in my long-winded, statistics-laden way is that this is far from a settled matter. You're predicting the death of the printed book based on a growing market representing less than 1% of the total book market, a market that is seeing steady growth, but also having an established pattern of growth followed by a flattening out. All of the evidence suggests that the e-book is going to become like the audiobook - a strong complement to the printed book, but not a replacement. The indicators that you would expect to see at this point in time for a dramatic change - a substantial and sustained drop in print book sales followed by an equal and sustained rise in e-book sales, along with the expected growth rate, simply isn't present.

Compare with DVD sales, for a moment - this is a case where there was a replacement of one product with another - the DVD was introdu

Is anyone else sick of proprietary ebook formats?

I have an N810 that I bought primarily for an ebook reader since it runs it runs Linux, the theory behind my purchase was someone out there had or would probably would create something that could read most formats, or I could find converters that could convert many things to some format it could read.

And then Amazon released the kindle with it's ultra-proprietary ultra-PITA format. There's mobi, Microsoft's format, and I'm sure Sony has something since they have a reader, and Sony is the biggest proponent of proprietary formats ever.

My personally preferred format is OEB which is really just html with an xml document specifying book information. That FB reader that my N810 uses renders beautifully and pre-populates author/title information for me.

Does anyone know of a converter for some of the DRMed proprietary formats that convert to OEB? I have Linux (Ubuntu) and windows available to run things on.

PDFs of "public domain" or donated works will always be available. Amazon has gotten enough sh*t about the excerpts that they publish to entice the reader to buy the book. Google "e-book" and you'll see Yahoo! is nowhere near the only source. There is even an open-source e-book idea at Open eBook - http://www.openebook.org/ -- Information on the publication specification for electronic books that will allow compatibility between different e-book devices.

I just wonder how Yahoo! will make $$$ of this very small market of public domain works, or if they DO get repro rights to other books what the price model is to download them, or will you just see advertisements in your e-books? The authors are not going to give up their $$$ nor is Yahoo so somebody is going to have to pay for this content.

PDF *is* one of the formats for commercial ebooks. As a matter of fact, Adobe is one of the early entrants into ebook technology and standards. They are one of the founders of the Open eBook Forum, the main ebook industry organization. The PDFs are DRM'd with Adobe's own standard, but it's a very common format.

Something like a Newton with a real hand-held optimized OS, a free software development system, the ability to handle all popular e-book formats (including Newton books, Open E-Books, Palm DOCbooks, etc.), numerous available apps, 802.11g, Bluetooth, 10/100 ethernet, FAX capabilities, and the capability to handle virtual machines for Java, Z-Machine, and Glulx.

Then just squeeze it all down to fit into a Palm-sized case.

Instead, it was meant as common format for publishers and content-providers to create and store books for later conversion to myriad proprietary binary formats. This paragraph seems to have gone, and the binary format soup continues to this day.

I'm involved with eBook standards development (check out www.openebook.org), and I'm not very optimistic about the future of eBooks as they stand. There is really no standardization in terms of reading devices, and no real consumer market for an eBook. What's going to make eBooks run is added-value, not great content - if the Harry Potter eBook contained video, sound, games, etc., THEN I'd be looking to buy an eBook. My guess is that for eBooks to exist mainly as books, their future is going to be in academia and reference - things that really can be better with a searchable interface, or other technological enhancements. Current fiction, unless given some sort of sensory enhancement, won't cut it in the eBook world.

I don't know that the current open ebook specification would pass a GPL test, but it is open, to the extent that it is XML and openly documented. You can write documents to it and view them in several of the currently available readers; whip out your XSLT processor to view HTML, etc. If they do their DRM (digital rights management) stuff properly, it will be an additional layer which will not inhibit the use and distribution of open content.

In the faq about the eBook it is mentioned that they support the Open eBook format, which seems to be mostly XML with well-formed HTML. The specification is at http://www.openebook.org/specification.htm.

So it should be quite easy to convert documents...

- to the guy who thinks Gutenberg are doing it right; ASCII would be useless for books like Tristram Shandy or Alice in Wonderland which use things other than ASCII. Its also useless for works in languages other than English, textbooks with diagrams, and so on.

- Book readers on my PC are no use; as other people pointed out, if you're using a reference you need to flick between the text and the thing you're doing.

- I hate dead trees. I travel round the country 2 or 3 days a week; I am now down to 1 (1) manual in dead tree format because its an NDA'd text the vendor only supplies on murdered oak; its 700 pages and hurts my shoulder...

In short, give me an eBook reader I can download huge chunks of pdf, or OpenEBooks on to and I will be your friend. My only worry with eBooks is if the reader breaks, then I've lost the text. Paper has an edge here in that it absorbs the food/drink I spill on it and keeps working.

So the added value service *I* want is an online bookshelf I can _upload_ text to; a mymp3.com for eBooks if you will, that records the fact that I've bought the stuff that needs to be bought, but doesnt limit me to commercial texts. That way I won't lose all my stuff when my PC/reader dies. And then I want someone to scan in all those books that have taken over my house...

PDF files are pretty much platform indedendent. A possible solution would be to use PHP to output the document in PDF format with the user's information encrypted into the file. That way illegal copies/redistributions could be tracked to their source. The licencing terms for the book could provide liability against abusers and you could warn then before they download about the possibility of being busted this way.

OpenEbook is trying to set a standard for publishing documents across multiple platforms. Though it wong prevent copying/redistribution it may allow the document to be read actoss multiple platforms.

PGP may be a security method. Once you decide on a easily distributible format you need a method of having an unlock key for only people who pay.

The real advantage of XML-based file formats is that they should be easier to write a program for than binary ones. Check out the Open eBook Initiative. Given that the first round of eBook readers never went very far, someone got the bright idea that a standard, straight-forward format would be good for business. It probably will be. But it's also good for developers. If the OEB spec really lives up to claim and is a genuine XML-document DTD, it shouldn't be that hard to write 3rd party book reader programs for existing devices like, say, the Palm? The upcoming Yopy? Your Linux desktop?

That's where the real benefit of XML files come in. They will help in conversion, but will really help in simplifying the process of just writing compatability for the DTD into 3rd party programs.

--GrouchoMarx

Reverse engineering wouldn't be necessary if people would use an open standard format (i.e, the Open Electronic Book Initiative). See the proposal at

http://www.openebook.org/specification.htm

1. Based on XML
2. Mainly HTML-compatible
3. Can be turned into ASCII, PDF, whatever
4. Will be the standard for NuvoMedia's Rocket Books

The first draft of the Open eBook standards are supposed to be agreed upon by the first of September. You can find a little info here:

http://www.openebook.org

and lots of info here:

Ebooks now: an overview

announcement of Open eBook at the Ebook 98 Workshop

info about the Ebook 99 workshop in September

Open eBook details 981019

Open eBook update 990201