Slashdot Mirror
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."
It's called ASCII.
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.
How do I print them and bind them?
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.
i released a (crappy) doc reader (there have been better ones since) for the AportisDOC standard for e-books under the GPL a loong time ago. ...theres no real need for yet another crappy e-book standard. we already have one.
http://zurk.sourceforge.net/zdoc.zip
The DOc format is open, can be extended to be secure and is already out there
For a technophile like me, reading an ebook is fine (I once read the complete stories of Sherlock Holmes stories on my PDA). But for most people, a page turning, bookmarking, throw-it-in-your-bag-and-go book is much more pleasurable to read.
Perhaps the lack of success on ebooks is because reading one just isn't the same.
There's a reason the book format has been popular since Julius Caesar. He didn't have a European power adapter to recharge his ebook!
Sigs are for lusers. Hey! wait a second...
I read a Stephen King interview where he said that people just aren't into books anymore. And it's basically true.
DVDs and CDs and TVs and LCDs have replaced the printed word. Many househoulds don't even have ONE BOOK on display. Kids are going to start growing up without ever having read a book at home or had their parents read to them.
It's truly a sad state of affairs here in America.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
Do you know why I didn't buy a handheld ebook reader? I will tell you. NONE of them would display PDF's. Not a one, at least I was unable to find one that would.
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!
The extensive Data Format is public, well-documented, and used in dozens of other projects. Lots of companies, commercial and non-profit, have adopted the Plucker format for their content delivery. Out of the other "free" options out there, Plucker reigns supreme (it is also the ONLY one out there that is publically documented, and "Free" to use).
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.
It won't affect Gutenburg at all. They do not want to release in eBook format, or anything other than ASCII. Its not that they have not released in ebook format because of the lack of a standardized format, they have stayed with ascii for a very simple reason.... you can turn ascii into anything else, but once its in another format, then you may loose something transferring into another format. So even if they come up with a "Perfect" eBook format, its not going to affect Gutenburg at all
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
The hardware wouldn't try to be a convergence device; it doesn't have to cram down to the form factor of a phone, it doesn't have to be a big ol' web pad. (It could be an organizer with a little extra software.) It could do copy prevention if implemented by Adobe and accepted by users.
It would give an incentive for many people to publish to it (the people who are writing to be read, and not just to make money). Everyone dumping their scree on the web would have a more readable outlet.
I think it's possible that demand for such a thing would be enough initially to cross the first production hurdle, then grow the same way the WWW did.
FLAC - Free Lossless Audio Codec
I got an RCA eBook for my girlfriend. There is nothing wrong with it. The screen is nice to read, the battery lasts long enough, and it is comfortable to hold and turn pages.
It's just a pain in the ass to use with Linux, and the selection of books when you plug in via the modem is pretty bad, and you get this "bookshelf" hosted by some company you aren't sure will be around, and if they fold you lose your books, have no way to back them up to your Linux system, and are pretty much SOL. There are a few projects for creating new eBooks, but it isn't trivial to get them copied to the unit.
This really sucks; I'd love to replace certain types of paper books I have with one of these readers. I don't have any particular attachment to paper books for most purposes. And I'd love to be able to grab gutenberg's books and put them on her reader easily.
Oh, wait...
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)"
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.
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
For those who haven't heard of it yet: TEI is an open SGML/XML format created for electronic editions of literary texts. It is as comprehensive and well-designed for text philology as DocBook is for technical documentation. The only drawback is that it is, like DocBook, very comprehensive and accurate in its markup tags (fulfilling all needs of academic editions of historical texts), so that for average readers, the trimmed-down TEI Lite DTD should do the job.
For e-literature collections created by professional philologists - such as the Victorian Women Writers Project, TEI already is the standard text format. Thanks to the SGML/XML toolchain, TEI sourcecode can, like DocBook, of course be painlessly transformed into HTML, txt, RTF, PDF etc. (TEI is, btw., also being mentioned in Eric S. Raymond's quite useful DocBook Demystification HOWTO.)
Florian
(philologist by profession)
gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
Baen Books (www.baen.com) has been giving away e-books of early titles in popular author's series for some time. They've even been putting them on CDs in major new books. The result has been increased sales of the dead tree versions of those same books, plus increased interest in the current and new versions.
No DRM, no passwords, no encryption. You just can't turn around and sell it.
That basically says one thing to me: people really don't want the e-book version of something they read for pleasure. They prefer the dead tree version. When the rest of the publishers wake up and discover that the e-book is a marketing tool rather than a profit center, all this idiocy about multiple versions and DRM will vanish.
John Roth
This issue of eBOOK compatibility seems to be a red hearing to me. I purchase ebooks for my palm devices (now a treo 600) fairly regularly and only once have I run into a book I wanted that was not availible in a compatible format (and the contents of that book...short stories..were availible in a compatible version).
Not only do most books come in multiple formats so do most readers on mobile devices (no one is going to read an ebook on their PC...well some freak on slashdot might but except for computer related manuals it just isn't as practical or enjoyable as with something mobile). Furthermore many readers are distributed freely. I simply can't see how this is blocking sales.
Also almost every ebook currently on the market doesn't use many complicated formatting options requiring any innovative format. This isn't do to lack of a standart but because most normal books don't contain many illustrations and palm pilot devices are the best for pictoral information.
Still, I do support the attempt at a universal open format. However, as the stated goal of eBOOK formats is to *prevent* copying I won't be able to share ebooks with a friend anyway so it is at most a minor convience.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
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.
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
That's why all my e-books are from Gutenberg or Baen. No DRM. Baen are great, they realise that releasing e-books without any DRM hassles actually increases sales. When you get a book from them, you can get it in just about any format you want, inluding RTF and HTML, from which you should be able to convert to any format they don't provide. I've bought some e-books from them, and plan to buy more.
I love reading novels on my Palm. The backlit screen means I can read in the dark; if I fall asleep while reading it just turns off and remembers my place; I can even read in the sauna if I put my Palm in a plastic ziplock bag. It carries a whole slew of books in less space than a single paperback, so when I finish the book I'm reading, I just have to go back to the list and pick a new one.
I never thought that e-books would be any good until I tried it. Now I'm a convert. If only I could walk into my local bookstore and ask to get a book beamed into my PDA.
Politas
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".