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Open eBook Forum Courts Controversy Over Formats
Brad Rigby writes "TeleRead's David Rothman is calling for [1,
2] the replacement of the Open eBook Forum by "an honest
trade association" and a related standards body to create an open standards ebook format at the consumer-level. This will benefit publishers, distributors and retailers, librarians,
the open-source community, and most importantly book readers. Largely because of the proprietary
format wars, ebooks have flopped commercially, with only an estimated ten million dollars in sales in 2003. In
addition, OeBF is being held hostage by its Gold Sponsors, including Microsoft, Adobe, and Palm Digital, companies
with proprietary, incompatible ebook format solutions. And to make matters worse, OeBF's president, Steve Potash, runs
OverDrive, a company profiting from this "Tower of eBabel", which, according to David, is an
obvious conflict of interest and the reason why OeBF is no longer living up to the promise of a standard consumer ebook format. Interesting detail:
The OeBF is so focused on promoting its Gold Sponsors that it has yet to speak out against European VATs that will tax e-books but not p-books."
Does anyone actually think that the lack of a single format is scaring consumers away from ebooks, and solely because of this they've been a flop? I'd wager to guess that ebook sales are going to be pretty dismal for quite a ways into the future.
..because of incompatible format but because most people just don't want to read a book on the computer screen.
They want to take the book with them (and not everyone has a laptop), they want to read it on the toilet, they think it's uncomfortable reading long texts from screen, and with many screen and workplace setups it is unhealthy too.
Have ebooks really flopped "largely due to format wars," or is it actually more to do with ease of use? I've yet to come across a mass-market reader that matches the flexibility of paper (sorry!) and that won't kill me if I try to read in the bath...
Largely because of the proprietary format wars, ebooks have flopped commercially, with only an estimated ten million dollars in sales in 2003.
Or maybe, just maybe, people prefer real books? Maybe the market just isn't there right now.
And optionally, a small subset of HTML.
Which works well until you want to do anything as rudimentary as a children's novel, in which pictures are a good idea.
What's that? ASCII art you say? Tell that to a med student studying up on anatomy. I'd like to see the intricacies of the human nervous system represented in ASCII.
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
in 80s, we would have still been playing records and cassettes (and may be mp3-ogg versions of them). see what happened to DAT, DCC, MD etc.
My feeling is that analog is better than DRM corrupted digital. Ofourse, the best is open-digital like CD-audio.
Largely because of the proprietary format wars, ebooks have flopped commercially
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
of having to lend my entire e-book library to someone if I want to lend them a book to read, as opposed to the traditional method of lending a single book from my library to someone and then never getting it back. Lending an e-book and 1) potentially losing a $200 reader and 2) not being able to read any other e-books in the interim (unless I have another reader) is a major disincentive to buying and using e-books.
Oh, and they don't have very many features that regular books don't have, other than restrictive DRM.
Thanks but no thanks.
PDF's are really all about layout and most PDF documents are for printing to 8.5"x11". Most e-book readers aren't going to be in a form factor that can conveniently display 8.5"x11" pages. You would constantly have to be scrolling around. An e-book should have markup that can be adjusted to reflow text and graphics to whatever the display allows. Not only does PDF not allow that, it's pretty well designed to not allow that since its main selling point is that what you see on the screen is exactly what will be printed out (given resolution limitations).
It's just that no one wanted what they offered. Look at the things that are the top sellers, they're mostly academic and reference books. Those things are PERFECT for electronic adaptation because they BEG for the search capability that the format provides. The thechinical specifics are pretty irrelevent.
But for pleasure reading nothing beats paper! You can get it in your choice of editions (Ever tried to read large type on a palm or pocketpc? You'll get half a sentence per screen.) The batteries never run out, the sun never washes out your screen (color) or "flash blinds" you (monochrome). The boot up is instentaneous, pick it up, turn to bookmark. You can even have it "on" during takeoff, you don't have to get freakin' permission from an anal-retentive control-freak stewardess to use it!
That being said nothing beats the 256mb reference library in my pocket when I need it.
The problem with the ebook crowd isn't the product, it's that they (act like they) don't know what their customers want. Microsoft was roundly derided for surveying LINUX users about what they liked. Other groups should take a cue from them. Maybe if the ebook publishers PRODUCED WHAT THEIR CUSTOMERS WANTED TO BUY they could sell something (notice that Microsoft mostly publishes SEARCHABLE REFERENCES)!
What a concept, ask the customer what he would buy-then sell it to him!
It doesn't matter what you wrap your emotions around, Reality is a brick wall specifically designed to scramble eggs
We all have seen the many publisher provided services for purchasing E-books.
These services try to limit your options and choices or even to remove them from you totally. With many of these services you must agree that you do not even own that which you wish to purchase in order to buy it. Instead they license you right to use their private property.
We see the prices on the virtual which rival that of the physical. We instinctively know that the production cost of a E-book is so much less than the cost of a compact disc or a printed book both of which require paper, ink, artwork, packaging and so much more that is totally lacking from the ethereal versions.
Their sales decline. "Stop the thieves" they cry out into the night! Make more and harsher laws to protect that which is already protected they demand of our governments. Protect our property and damn the public's rights is their idea of an ideal. I am a honest person is my vehement reply. So why attempt punish me for the crimes of others.
They attempt to smother new technology on the premise that it may possibly be used for illegal activity.
While it is not my intention to justify the theft of their material I must point out it's their own fault really. I blame their lack of foresight and their lack of anything resembling common sense. They do not exploit the markets available for them or if they do it's a halfhearted attempt. In the real world people are not buying what you sale one common step generally taken is to consider lowering your prices until your sales pick up. This also applies on the Internet.
In a concise conclusion I state that I personally prefer to compensate the authors and composers of the material that I so enjoy in my daily life. Currently I do so off-line. So Publishing and recording industries I say make it worth my while and convenient to do so and I will be one of the first in line online.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
I wouldn't go that far. I can only speak for myself, but reading is one of those things that needs to be learned before you can enjoy it.
Ok, now that you've gotten the "is this guy a complete fscking idiot" thoughts out of your head, I'll explain. Aside from just not having time to read, I have been diagnosed with a learning disability. I have a problem with reading, especially if what I'm reading is in a different dilect then what I'm use to (i.e. Shakespeare). And it usually takes me a long time to read things even if it is something I understand. For the longest time, I disliked recreational reading because it was too boring and took too long.
What I've learned is that I just needed to find a better way to read. It helps that I'm interested in the material, but if I break the reading into short periods (say, no more then 30 minutes), I found that it's easier to stay focused and easier to retain. With that I've begun to read books that I've only heard references to, and thought before that they would take too long to read. That was the exact reason I read Nineteen Eighty-Four. It took me three months to read it but now I understand more, not only the references but the underlying message in the book. And I've become interested in other books now to. And this fits into my schedule perfectly since I usually read on the bus to and from work.
I think kids today do have more to distract them, but it's no reason for them to not read. I think someone just has to teach them ways to do it, so that it fits into their lives better. Reading can be fun, if you know how to do it properly.
Call me slow, but I really don't understand why HTML/CSS shouldn't be the format. All this talk of PDF and/or some newfangled committee-generated format puzzles me. User-customizable stylesheets should ameliorate most questions of format and readability. Don't like black text on a blinding white screen? Change your stylesheet. Like big print? Like things to wrap? Like things paginated rather than scrollinated? Want a text reader to read your novels to you on the train while you look out the window at the scenery? None of these things are particularly tricky.
Good point. I'm asking myself right now "Can a open standard include DRM without completely jeapardizing DRM"? I don't think so. Formats including DRM always have to be closed. If they are open, anybody can recreate the App that accesses the content but leave away any restrictions.
So, in short, the initiative to create "a open eBook standard", which presumes some DRM, is already dead in its tracks.
But I've been using and reading e-books for years now, and I love them, to the point where I barely buy paperbacks anymore. I read them all the time on my old Ahndspring, and a while ago when I upgraded to a Zaurus, I kept right on reading them. I've been an avid reader since early childhood, and am often reading several books at once. Carrying several paperbakcs in my bags all the time tended to create some serious wear and tear on the books after a short while.. the bookmarks would fall out of step if I bounced my bag a bit to much (which happened a lot during my college years), and I generally found paperbacks to be somewhat inconvenient.
Enter the e-book. Now I carry a whole reference library (Dictionary, thesaurus, etc.), plus 5-7 random SF, Fantasy, and other novels and books, all in one pocket, in my Zaurus' CF card. When the urge to read strikes, I just hit a button to turn it on (instant bootup PDA), and within seconds I can choose any one of the books I'm reading, and they pick up exactly where I left off (qtreader is great), I can have multiple bookmarks, and I can search those books that need searching. Reading is comfortable and easy with the Zaurus' high-contrast screen (and I use glasses with a fairly high (-7) level of miopia, but I still find it easy to read and adjust the font size while still fitting ina couple of paragraphs of text on a screen), and if I don't want to keep hitting the 'down' button to flip pages, I can set it to a comfortable level ofauto-scroll and just lay back and let the text wash over my eyes.
In short, I love e-books, and I'm exactly the sort of person ebook publishers should be trying to target. However, the vast majority of e-books I have, I will admit, are pirated. I do have paper copies of a lot of the books in my e-book collection, but e-books are so much more convenient for me than regular books, that I'd rather have an electronic version than a paper one. And for the most part, most books I want to read are simply not released in e-book formats. I *want* to have e-book versions of the books I own. However, due to the small availability and constant format/DRM wars, there are very few places online where I can buy an e-book in a format that I can read on my Zaurus. Meanwhile, the folks in newsgroups and several places online are busy scanning and typing in hundreds of thousands of books and putting them online for free.
To e-book publishers: while you wrangle and try to find a way to lock down the user and make 'sure' that no one pirates your e-books or gives them away or lends them or does anything out of your control, there's a whole bunch of folks out there happily scanning the paper editions of your books and putting them online for free in simple, unlocked formats. While you continue to deny those of us who *Want* e-books the freedom to choose what platform we want to read on and what we want to do with our books, these people will continue to provide your product for free without your permission. Make books available in electronic formats, formats that are compatible across all platforms, with a minimum of hassle and DRM, and give them away free with the paper edition of the books, or sell them at a substantially reduced price from the paper edition (face it, they cost a lot less to produce in e-book format, and I can't help but laugh whenever I see an e-book version of a book selling for as much, or sometimes more, than the paper version), and let me choose what I do with my books, and you will have an eager customer for life.
"Two things are infinite: the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the first one." - Albert Einstein
Although you have a point, I'd also point out that the reason we have iTunes or any other legal music download service is that 'illegal' competition from napster and the like forced the hand of the music industry. The music industry never (ok, not 'never', but certainly not for a long time and not on such a large scale) would have done such a thing on their own. This situation doesn't exist in the publishing world because of the comparative difficulty of 'pirating' paper books in electronic form. It takes a lot of scanning, typing, or some very illegal corporate espionage to achieve the equivalent when it comes to published materials.
You forget that much of the target audience for eBooks are already carting around an expensive PDA or laptop. All a good eBook reader plus books would do is add more benefit to offset the risks of carrying the devices around in the first place.
But their ASCII is a giant pain-in-the-ass if you want to change it to anything using mark-up. Their ASCII lacks *any* information on how the page is organized. Want to read it in anything more sophisticated than vi? Forget it.
Yes, free-formatted ASCII is the least-common-denominator. The emphasis goes on LEAST. As in the format with the LEAST usable information.
Consider As You Like It. The lines are entered with hard returns at 80 columns. There is no easy way to get a machine to recognize the Scene and Act boundaries, no easy way to get a machine to distinguish between stage directions and dialog and even the character's names. The only navigation is the page-up and page-down key.
Doing anything useful (where "useful" even includes tolerable navigation through the document !) requires going through these texts all by hand.
They punted because the electronic formats are volatile, but there is a huge cost to it, in the extreme loss of essential information.
The only publisher that I know of that has even an inkling of a clue when it comes to ebooks is Baen.
Not only do they offer a wide variety of "free" books, but the books that you do pay for are cheaper than paperbacks. If you buy them in their monthly bundles they are considerably cheaper than paperbacks. Not to mention the fact that the books are available in unencrypted formats.
Read a few Baen books on your PDA (I would suggest the Belisarius series by David Drake and Eric Flint the first three are in the free library), and then tell me that carrying around 60 books on your PDA isn't better than trying to take a paperback without you everywhere.
eBooks might go somewhere if they were less (a lot less) than real books.
Sure if you have the choice between a $8 book in either paper or digital you're probably going to go paper (unless, like you say, you'd like to be able to search). But what if that eBook were $1 and the real book were $8? There are a lot of books I'd just say "I'm not sure if I'm going to want to use up storage space, I'll just pay a buck and back it up".
This is speaking from someone who has about a hundred boxes of paperbacks in the garage because you only want so many shelves in a house. I'd love to have a number of books in an electronic format on my Palm, just waiting for when I'm sitting around trying to kill an hour.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nobody actually uses ASCII any more. It's not adquate for internationalizable applications. It only contains a simple non-accented Latin alphabet, arabic numerals, space, and 33 other characters. Oh, and 33 non-graphic control characters, only 2 of which are relatively safe to use in text files and streams. That's just not enough for any application that isn't specific to the U.S.
You say you use ASCII every day? No you don't. You probably use some variation of Latin 1 and/or UTF-8. Both have the same values as ASCII for their first 127 characters, so the difference is usually transparent. Not always.
Now you're saying, "All right, ASCII, Latin 1, whatever. What I mean is plain text. That's the universal format." No it's not. There isn't even a single Latin 1. Aside from ISO Latin 1 (which is supposed to be the default for web pages, but no widely-used browser makes that assumption), there's Microsoft Latin 1 and Macintosh Latin. Add in UTF-8 (which Slashdot supposedly uses, though most of their pages actually use ISO Latin1), and you have four different "plain text" encodings in wide use. The results when files are shared between these platforms are often pretty gross. And these are just the encodings used in the Americas and Western Europe!
Even if there was a text encoding that absolutely everybody used, you wouldn't want to store all your books in it. You're throwing away too much data! That's why I gave up on Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders. When I downloaded a Gutenberg text, things like italics and boldface all appeared at ALLCAPS. VERY VERY IRRITATING! And when I helped proof DP's text scans, I wasn't given any proper way to enter to record all the subtle typography that was in those old texts. One particular omission was the absence of any clear separation between encylopedia articles. I found this particularly frustrating, because I joined DP to help bring the classic Britannica 11th Edition online. What's the point if you can't browse individual articles easily, or the Greek words are a mess, etc., etc.
What's the solution? Not HTML -- it's not general enough. Somebody needs to sit down and design a markup (probably an XML document type) that expresses the stuff you find in various kinds of books. I doubt of if this "Open EBook" thing will do, because it will have very narrow objectives -- find a way to distribute the next Steven King with proper DRM support. Not interesting to those of us who want to share a lot of public domain and Creative Commons stuff, and are mainly concerned with preserving the original character of the text. Maybe when I know more about writing DTDs and Schemas, I'll take a stab.
But doesn't that create files that aren't accesible to a lot of people? No, because you don't distribute the XML version isn't for distribution (except to those who really want it). Mostly you transform the XML into formats suitable for distribution: HTML, WML, ebook formats, and yes, "plain text".