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.

Comments

Better readers needed

[Baumi]

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.

Like the word processing industry

[sould]

Right now there's a plethora of essentially incompatible ebook formats, and this format 'babel' is hampering the growth of the ebook industry.

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?

but...but...

[corian]

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?

PDFs and html

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

There's a lot to be said for plain text

[gidds]

• It's universal. Everything supports it, from PDAs to supercomputers.
• It's versatile. If properly formatted, it's reflowable on different screen sizes, fonts, layouts, &c. And it's perfect for other access methods.
• It supports most characters you'd find in books. The de facto standard is the Windows Latin-1 encoding, which has all the punctuation as well as accented characters. (Yes, I know, I know. But it's not just on Windows -- both my Mac and my Psion use it, for example.)
• It's editable. There are tons of tools already available, from spell-checkers in editors to complex analysis. I've written some of my own, for instance; one converts from American to British spelling, which is how I like to read my books.
• It has conventions for /italics/, *bold*, _underlining_, &c. Yes, at first, these may look clumsy, but I actually prefer them in many ways, as they're more precise; for example, you can differentiate between *word* *by* *word* and *all at once* highlighting (see the Jargon File for the difference).
• It's compact. Plain text files are smaller than HTML, PDF, RTF &c, sometimes by a lot; and when compressed in formats like PalmDOC (pdb) or TCR, they can be made even smaller and still usable directly.
• It's future-proof. Plain text has been around for decades, and will be with us for many more, long after DRM keys have been lost and proprietary apps have died.

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!

The gaping flaw in their argument

[Dagmar d'Surreal]

"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.

It really isn't the formats...

[Mac Degger]

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.

both PDF and HTML

[bcrowell]

The article proposes two incompatible criteria: typographic richness (nice formatting) and adaptability (letting the end-user change font sizes, reflowing the text to display it on small and large screens, etc.). PDF is a perfectly good format for typographic richness, and HTML is a perfectly good format for adaptability. There is never going to be a single format that's good for both, because they're mutually exclusive.

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.