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."

Comments

so what?

[mutewinter]

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.

eBooks didn't catch on yet

[Karamchand]

..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.

Re:eBooks didn't catch on yet

[jared_hanson]

I agree with your point here. However, there is defiately a place for eBooks. In college, I longed for an electronic copy of my texts so I could search them on the computer. It was always a pain flipping through pages and skimming for info that I had read a week prior. Then, having to do it all over after realizing I had gone to far and must have missed what I was looking for.

It would have also been useful for printing out the problem at the top of the sheet of paper I was going to work the problem on. Its not fun having to flip back and forth between the problem at the end of the chaper and where it is detailed in the chapter's text.

Ebooks probably aren't suited for novels, but they could do wonders for school text books.

Format wars or something more fundamental?

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Wonder why it flopped?

[dus]

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.

Re:We already have a standard for eBooks.

[jared_hanson]

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.

Re:Why I didn't buy an ebook reader.

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Ebooks DID NOT fail.

[digrieze]

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!

Maybe it's just me...

[katsushiro]

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.