Slashdot Mirror
Universal Ebook Format Debated
Amy Hsieh writes "A well-known ebook industry expert, Jon Noring, recently wrote an interesting article for eBookWeb, formally calling upon the ebook industry to adopt a single universal ebook distribution format. Right now there's a plethora of essentially incompatible ebook formats, and this format 'babel' is hampering the growth of the ebook industry. In the article, Mr. Noring proposes a promising open-standards candidate which appears to meet a list of basic requirements: The Open eBook Forum's OEBPS Specification. Andy Oram, a Linux programming editor for O'Reilly, wrote an interesting reply to the article that should also be read." On the other hand, Noring's proposal has also met with some skepticism elsewhere.
What about .txt?
I don't think any format will get Ebooks to catch on until we have reader hardware that makes reading those books at least as pleasant as reading a paper book.
Here's hoping that all those e-paper efforts will produce something usable soon.
Yup - just like there's a plethora of essentially incompatible word processing formats - hampering the growth of the office/word processing market.
But the industry doesn't matter to one player - only their market share does.
The only way to really win this sort of thing is to persuade all (or at least most) consumers to boycott products that deliberately break compatability with standards.
But how likely is that to happen?
Different readers, different platforms, and different applications have different requirements!
Some uses want a format which is compact as possible. Some focus on readibility (switchable fots, etc.) Others -- facimile-style releases -- emphasize that the copy should as closely mimic the original work as possible. Formats can emphasize the syntactic structure of the text (sentences, paragraphs), or the structural qualities (line breaks, pages).
Even in their paper forms, books have different formats for different uses. Libraries prefer hardcovers, with durable bindings. Travlers prefer paperbacks, with small and light pages. Collectors pay extra for special editions, with quality supplies. Some readers prefer large-print copies, abridgements, or books on tape (in a choice of cassette tape or compact disc!)
Any format makes assumptions, and deletions. It's perfectly fine to have a multiplicity of formats. If its useable, and reasonably priced, people will buy it.
For me, the major hindrance to e-books is the price. Since there is no associated cost of the materials (paper/cardboard), printing, physical transportation, stocking space, and delivery, e-books should be [i]cheaper[/i] than physical books. But many of them are priced the same, or even high (you can check this at Amazon.) what's up with that?
I'm still amazed that the whole of the business world is happy to accept MSWord .doc as the standard to store virtually all of their documentation. I don't think the film industry would be happy standardizing on .avi or the music industry on .wav, so why doesn't the business word get it's act together and accept a better format than the crappy .doc?
Take a look at this - 1dok.org - an open document format
You have to be careful. Half of you are saying "I won't use this until e-books are as pleasant as paper books" and half of you are saying "why not use the standards that are already there? Just make the device do everything."
Don't you see these are at odds?
To make e-books as pleasant as real books, you're going to want to make them thinner and thinner in profile. You're going to want to make them run on a single lithium cell battery or AAA. You're going to want to drop all of the interface but the forward, back, and bookmarking buttons. You're going to want the computing device to be as close to nothing as possible, so you can put weight into making the device indestructible like a real book. You want to go to the store, buy the title, and have it just work, or go to Amazon and *know* your desired title is published in that format. That's the ideal, in the near term. It isn't a device that will easily accomodate PDFs and HTML and a number of other standards.
AAC is not as universal a standard as [...] Ogg.
Oh rubbish. AAC is used way more than Vorbis (which is what I assume you meant) is. Apple's target market was big enough to overtake Vorbis usage in a single day, I'd bet.
Yes, of course some spiffy new format will have other advantages. But it's unlikely to gain quick acceptance. Plain text documents are everywhere, as are readers and other software. There are even online publishers selling text files. In fact, ASCII text is arguably the most successful electronic standard there is!
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
You were planning on paying for the books you read, weren't you? Or is this all just an exercise in seeing how we can best Napsterize the publishing indutstry?
I was.
Because you might want to read an e-book of something NOT in the public domain, e.g, a current novel, and few authors or publishers are going to render their wares into a format that is going to end up on free P2P.
-- ac
The nice thing about a book is that it doesn't have a power switch - it's actually relaxing to sit there and read it.
no the nice thing about a book is that It cant be taken away from you, you can lend it to a friend, you can sell it at a garage sale or trade it in at a used book store.. all of which the Writers Guild DESPERATELY want to stop you from doing.
a paper book gives you a ton of freedom that publishers and writers are massively pissed off about and want to take away.
This is the real benefit. I can bury my books in a locker so that they cant be stolen or burned... my e-books can have their "license" revoked at and second for any reason or self destruct.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Adobe, can you hear me? Business Opportunity Nocking.
"Right now there's a plethora of essentially incompatible ebook formats, and this format 'babel' is hampering the growth of the ebook industry."
Bullshit.
The problem is that the few people who actually still read books are not likely to be stupid people. On top of that, the people who are reading electronic formats of books are even less likely to be stupid people.
However, it would take rather dim consumers indeed to not see a problem with paying the exact same cost for an eBook as one would in a brick and mortar bookstore for a paperback... and strangely when I go to these eBook sellers online, I see exactly that. "Oh joy! Instead of paying $7.95 for that paperback over an Barnes & Noble, I can pay just $7.95 to download an electronic copy in a format that I probably won't be able to read again in 10 years because the format and it's reader will have been declared obsolete!"
The unwillingness of eBook publishers to see eBooks as something other than a way to increase sales profits by cutting out the middlemen of printing and shipping expenses is what is hampering eBook adoption.Mass pirating in Asia asside, why not look at this from another direction?
Instead of being sad when a person who "happens" to get a copy somehow phones with questions, I would be happy, thrilled even, to have a potential new customer who would probably otherwise never have heard of me or even considered buying my stuff!!!
As an indenpendant publisher, your biggest obstacle is probably obscurity, not piracy. The occasional 'casual' copy exchanged from friend to friend is the best advertising your going to get without having to pay for it.
As it happens, this topic gets lots of discussion on the baen web boards. Jim has about as much experience with e-publishing of fiction as anyone else, and has strong views about what works in the "real world" to make money.
Though it might help, a universal format isn't what's hampering ebooks. It's price. I refuse to pay full price (and sometimes more!) for an etext of something I can get on paper; especially when I only get the etext.
Halfprice, maybe even quarter price, compared to deadtree is what ebooksellers should be going for...but if I still have to pay fullprice and I don't even get my dead tree, I'll pay the same for something slightly more tangible.
Now I would pay a couple of bucks (ie $2) more for a deadtree book which includes the etext.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
>Although end-users prefer not to purchase ebooks
>protected with DRM (Digital Rights Management),
>publishers are certainly interested in the DRM
>capability of the universal ebook format.
So although people would prefer not to buy books with this stuff, we're going to put it in there anyway. Whatever happened to listening to your customers?
Paper doesn't have "protection". Never did, really.
CD's didn't have "protection" until recently- what they've come up with is useless.
Cassette didn't have "protection". Neither did vinyl.
Everybody did FINE without protection. Protection does NOT equate to incentive. Lack of protection does NOT equate to lack of incentive.
How do you deal with piracy? Not by locking the stuff up. You deal with it by making it such that it is no longer profitable to do so- that is the REAL reason why piracy happens.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
What I mean by that is that for many books with complicated layouts (including my own free books), it's simply not possible to reflow the text automatically. Consider an illustrated science textbook, which is the kind of work I do. There's a lot of hand-tweaking involved in getting everything laid out on the pages in the best possible way. And my books' layouts aren't even that complex compared to a lot of the big commercial textbooks out there. Some slashdotters may have used LaTeX to write academic papers, so they'll know how LaTeX tries hard to flow the text correctly, but ultimately it doesn't always do what you want, and either you or the publisher ends up doing more tweaking.
The solution isn't that complicated: if a publisher wants a book to make an electronic book available in both a a typographically rich version and an adaptable version, they can create both a PDF version and an HTML version. Of course, this is really an answer to a question that the publishers never asked. Most publishers don't want open formats, because open formats won't allow them to continue to steal away the rights of end-users, such as the right of first sale.
Find free books.
Well there are a number of reasons why eBooks have failed.
First and foremost is technology. Not just the software but hardware too. You simply cannot beat a stack of dead tree pulp squashed flat for durability and portability. People simply don't want to buy anything that disappears when their hard disk crashes!
Secondly, DRM. Apple are starting to get the DRM idea right by allowing any number of CD burns and copies on a certain number of machines and iPods. Unfortunately, no book seller wants to agree to such liberal terms (with the exception of O'Reilly. Again, if your hard disk goes west you have to reapply for a license, yuk! In general, people regard books as property once they're bought. The IT idea of licensing simply doesn't wash with the masses.
Thirdly, and back to technology again, hardware and standards. Without a single, simple easy to use and very very low energy consuming platform, eBooks simply won't take over the world. TFT isn't good enough and the sheer delicate nature of any electronic gadgetry makes it a no no right from the start. The current standards and level of DRM handcuff-ness is just a joke at the moment. There is no single compelling standard and all tie users too much to one copy or perhaps two if they're lucky... forget it!
I worked for a big bookseller in the UK and we took a long hard look at eBooks (at great cost I may add!) and simply decided that the technology wasn't there yet and that the DRM implications make it prohibitive to implement in any sustainable manner. Perhaps Amazon and B&N can make it work for them, but I suspect that their sales are somewhat less than they would like.
Having said all this, I still think there is a chance.
Flexible displays that can take a pounding in a students back pack would be a good start. Make them stupidly energy efficient, add high capacity static memory (no hard disks!), single, simple, DRM liberal format and bring the price into the sub $100 range. Then we might see something happen. I'm not holding my breath though!