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Publishers Campaign For Universal E-Book Format
As the battle rages for control of the e-book market, publishers are starting to unite behind a common desire: a universal e-book format. David Shanks, chief executive at Penguin Group USA, said, "Our fondest wish is that all the devices become agnostic so that there isn’t proprietary formats and you can read wherever you want to read. First we have to get a standard that everybody embraces." The company's president, Susan Petersen Kennedy, explained that book publishers did not want to "make the same mistakes as the music industry, which had an epic struggle over electronic distribution and piracy and lost huge market share."
Issue solved. Everyone should just listen to me.
HTML
*.txt
(or *.pdf, if you're a stickler for pretty graphics).
Coming up with a "new standard" at this point is just wasted effort.
Susan Petersen Kennedy, explained that book publishers did not want to "make the same mistakes as the music industry, which had an epic struggle over electronic distribution and piracy and lost huge market share."
Well shit, even the book industry is laughing at the music industry now.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Done. Next!
Problem solved.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
I'm guessing mr. Shanks doesn't know about ePub, a free and open e-book standard made by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF)..
And Apple's iBookstore already uses ePub.
"Oh, and don't get me wrong, we already have good standards, but they don't suck enough. By that I mean they don't arbitrarily restrict our readers in stupid ways. I long for the day we have a universal sucky e-book format."
The current readers can read .txt files can't they?
Duh?
If they mean DRM, then they should take a second look at the music industry, which dropped DRM more than a year ago.
"...First we have to get a standard that everybody embraces..."
Good luck with that...if the battle with HTML 5 is any indication. Heck, what about document formats? Good luck with that too!
..ink on paper. Advantages as follows:
1. Someone will steal an iPad or eBook reader from your bag at the airport, not a dog-eared paperback.
2. For all the tree-huggers out there, you can only use paper from sustainable sources.
3. If it takes you 12 hours to read a book from start to finish, it will take you the same time to read the eBook. On most devices that means carrying around a spare set of batteries or finding somewhere to recharge.
4. Electronic media is all about "me me me" whereas physical media can be loaned to family and friends, thus encouraging more social interaction.
5. A used book can be given away to a charity or be sold to go towards the price of the next book.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Here's my wish for PDF to be chosen. Unfortunately it seems almost to obvious and easy for the consumer, so I'll not be surprised if some other format is chosen for god knows what reason (tighter digital restrictions most likely).
I have bought a couple of e-books directly from manning.com. All in PDF (I've avoided whatever other digital format they're trying to push). Easy, convenient and excellent value.
I do applaud the publishers for realizing that they need this. Now please don't make another mistake of music industry by making the content loaded with DRM, which only hurt legitimate customers (yes, the music industry has, at least partly, realized that drm has no value-add what-so-ever)
They don't want to make the same mistakes, and yet they're following the same path anyhow.
DRM DOES NOT WORK.
If someone tried to sell me a security measure that encouraged thieves to attempt to steal my products while preventing my legit customers from using them and made everyone angry, I'd tell them where to shove it.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
DRM could be combined with file compression, and the decompression/unlocking (copy & save-as disabling) tool could be available as a Firefox plugin. So long as publishers aren't locked into electronic distribution via only one vendor, it really shouldn't matter whether the same books are available in several formats. If the common format is the one most convenient for the people doing the reading, it'll eventually win.
While it's a smaller market (and yes, it is. Way. A number 1 bestseller is barely worth a neilson point) it's already pretty fragmented. It's good that they're trying and perhaps with some luck they can get somewhere, but we're already talking post-itune/zune/et al universe compared to music. Nothing works well with anything else, except of course, if you don't pay for it and just pirate or stick to only the material specifically for your device. As usual, legal works need to be at least as good as their pirated counterparts to those who buy them, as in "if both of these were free and legal, I'd have no preference".
Exactly. The publishers want to take control away from the retailers like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc., and it's just not going to happen.
I mean, what exactly would be the retailer's motivation? There is none. If anything they would readily acknowledge it would hurt them. So why would they go for this?
Right. The fact is, you can make a reader that reads multiple formats, so that's not *really* the problem. I mean, creating hardware or software to read the books is a hell of a lot more convenient when you've standardized things, but the real problem that makes vendor lock-in an issue is DRM.
If they really wanted to avoid the mistakes of the music industry, they would drop DRM immediately and move towards making extremely convenient distribution, storage, and backup. That's how you maintain some measure of control. If they don't do that, then I almost feel like they can't complain when they're left without a functional business model.
http://www.org/
H.T.H.
Course it should probably be zipped as well.
Deleted
PDF is an excellent format for print, because it lets you specify your layout down to the smallest detail. The problem with PDF is that it only works if the page size of your device is the same as the page size of the PDF file.
Changing the font size in a PDF file doesn't work (you can zoom in, of course, but then you have to scroll left to right and top to bottom to read). Using a screen with a different aspect ratio than your PDF has similar problems.
Sony has done some clever work to "reflow" PDFs in their reader, but it doesn't work for everything, and it's a bit slow.
ePub would be my solution of choice.
I'm continually amazed at the extreme terminological imprecision of some people in the tech industry.
The word agnostic means someone who believes it's impossible to know whether God exists or not. It does not mean a device which can display book files from multiple publishers. That new usage is not even vaguely analogous to the old one, because it does not connote uncertainty or lack of knowledge at all, nor does it involve knowledge about spiritual matters. For example, the device in question has no uncertainty about whether the book files exist, and holds no opinions on spiritual matters.
The Greek root gnosis doesn't just mean knowledge; it implies knowledge of spiritual matters.
Why would they mean DRM when the fashion industry has only just ridiculed the notion as protecting anything? The timing suggests they're trying to leverage the fashion world's very public statement, which can only mean that they're wanting to look at solving the problem some other way. Not necessarily a better way or a workable way, but different.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Let's get together and call it text. Oh gosh! Somebody did that a couple of hundred years ago.
.txt has no image capacity and formatting is difficult.
They mean Digital Restrictions Management. It is a mistake to let them say what they want is a universal format. What they want is some form of control that isn't vendor-locked to a distributor who isn't them. And it ain't gonna happen.
Precisely. It's all about the DRM. If we are lucky this will play out exactly like it did for the music industry. Those fatcats didn't voluntarily stop using DRM - they just got so sick of Steve Jobs and his monopoly control of itunes that they figured dropping DRM was the lesser of two evils. It was either keep DRM and lose pricing control to Jobs or drop DRM and regain pricing control via multiple reseller like Walmart, Amazon. The tv & movie guys have avoided dropping DRM because Apple does not hold a monopoly on video playback devices. If the ebook market goes the way of the mp3 player, then the ebook publishers will probably have to go to something like plain HTML in order to escape Jobs's tyranny.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I don't think publishing will see nearly the same scope of piracy due to the nature of their customers (well read, well heeled. educated, and generally able to afford books). Also, any idiot can put together a few microchips a battery and a headphone jack with a digital watch display. The internals of an ebook reader are about the same as an MP3 player, but you need a decently high quality screen and great battery life to really use pirated ebooks. The vast, vast minority of people read entire novels in their computer chair.
The people out there paying $45.96 for the latest hardback copy of Stephen King's new novel aren't really interested in reading it in front of the computer, and if they can afford an ebook reader are probably happy to pay for the privilege to read it on that. Books don't appeal on a 1:1 level to people who pirate the latest Britney Spears or Justin Biber CD. Maybe 1% of those people pirating mainstream music and movies are interested in pirating pleasure reading novels. Even fewer would have ever bought the book full price in hard cover.
On the flip side you have smaller poorer countries that import a lot of American culture that they might be losing potential sales to, where it's simply not possible, or very difficult to buy in their country.
moox. for a new generation.
The publishers are the ones standing in the way by demanding DRM.
But now they want to have their cake and eat it too. So they'll attack Amazon and Apple for building their own DRM systems instead of handing Adobe or MS a monopoly by licensing theirs...
Not necessarily a better way or a workable way, but different.
Watermark all the images in the books and kick back and have a brew.
The only downside is the server-side processing requirements are greater, and there'd be a way to know who owned a used book originally.
I can live with that. Traditional DRM, not so much.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
and there'd be a way to know who owned a used book originally.
to clarify: the holder of the seller's keys would, not the subsequent buyers.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
A long time ago, when Project Gutenberg texts were really the only "ebooks" one could find, I had the idea of creating a separate data file that would accompany the .txt files. My idea was to leave the actual content of the book in plaintext for maximum portability, but allow fancy formatting (pagination, font, links, etc) via a separate binary file which would reference the .txt by character position. The key point is that the original Gutenberg texts would not be touched.
If edits were made to just the .txt without updating the formatting (which would mainly consist of fixing typos or OCR errors), then the binary could be "updated" by doing a diff between the old and new .txt files and offsetting the formatting positions appropriately. The beauty of it is that the binary could be updated independently of the content.
I foresaw another group of volunteers, essentially residing above the Gutenberg group, that would format the content to match specific editions of the books. Multiple formatting could accompany a single .txt, allowing the reader to select the edition they wanted.
Anyway I thought that sort of scheme would be the ultimate ebook format, but since it obviously isn't DRM friendly it would never fly in this day and age.
Better known as 318230.
Is an open-source, unencumbered one that could allow us to have an ebook on a PC as well. I am tired of closed source, patent encumbered shit.
I literallly just discovered today Calibre which is "a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books." I bought a B&N Nook a few months back and have been getting most of my ebooks from Project Gutenberg, manybooks.net, etc and have been frustrated with incorrect/lacking metadata, or finding ebooks elsewhere in formats I couldn't readily put on the Nook. This software seems pretty damn slick, especially with fetching metadata from Google Books or isbndb.com (didn't even know they existed before!) and it can convert damn near any format to anything. So until we do get a universal ebook format, perhaps people can check out Calibre.
http://calibre-ebook.com/
I've worked in both electronic publishing and paper publishing - not book publishing.
We know about TXT, HTML, and PDF. We like them, except when it comes to protecting our copyrights. That's why we come up with "other" formats that aren't open. I doubt we'll ever convince any of our publishing friends to support HTML unless there's a DRM wrapper around it.
Honestly, HTML should be the format used for e-publishing. It let's the viewer decide fonts, font sizes, the flow of text, and it supports a wide variety of graphics files. That is idea for publishing pretty much any content - including all those white papers and other technical journals. HTML is the best for static content.
PDF is a distant 3rd, but only if you have marketing types trying to place things so subliminal messages are tied between the graphics and text.
They're making the EXACT same mistakes as the music industry. They don't want a universal format. We have one. It's called ePub. They want universal DRM. Which isn't gonna happen.
The music industry tried the same thing. We wound up with multiple different DRMed formats that only worked on specific devices. All were incompatible with each other. Most were overpriced compared to CDs (the elimination of the physical distribution and associated costs should have been factored into digital sales from day one). And if someone did try to make a tool to unlock your music from a device so you could use it on another device you owned, they were sued... and it was made illegal even for fair use with bought-and-paid-for legislation in the US. So, everyone got used to stealing music, since it was the only way to actually get what you want on the device you wanted it and be able to listen to it anywhere.
Now, the Big Publishing is making the exact same mistakes. Insisting on DRM. All of it is on different platforms in different formats. None of it works with anything else. And the pricing is absolutely absurd compared to paperback sales. So, what happens? Everyone is starting to steal books using file sharing, etc. Big Publishing is already losing, they just don't realize it yet. And for all their whining about wanting a universal format and not wanting to make the same mistakes as Big Music, history is already repeating itself.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
I read this as just another shot in that war. Don't get me wrong . . . a reader-seller-neutral format would be cool (ePub might not be inappropriate) but Penguin seems an odd advocate given that they're whining because Amazon was willing to lose money on their books...
Baen seems to handle this just fine with non-DRMed formats of .html, .mobi etc. etc. If THEY were the ones advocating this, it might be worth getting behind.
Highly unlikely. You see, Apple got timing right with the iPod and iTunes Music Store - neither markets were really "for the average person" when Apple inroduced those things (yes, there were MP3 players before the iPod, and music stores before iTMS, but the average user couldn't really use them back then). This led to iTunes' domincance on the online music store scene coupled with the iPod dominance in the portable music player market.
But right now, we have many highly-competitive book readers on the market - Sony, Amazon and B&N on the E-ink side, and Apple on the LCD screen side. They're competing against each other - two are big book sellers, one is veteran selling ebooks (Sony's been doing it for years), and Apple's well, Apple. No one device is taking up the whole market (Sony could've, being the only reader out there more or less at the time), and they're all taking up shares of a tiny market.
Amazon and B&N both have apps for Apple's devices, so you could can use their books on the iPad and the like, which means iBooks is already at a disadvantage. And Amazon and Apple have managed to lock publishers up in such a way that prices cannot be reduced on one store vs. another. The only real way out is if the publishers themselves end up getting fed up of supporting so many formats that they themselves give up and go DRM-free, because there's no dominant player to want to "break out from". Sony, B&N, and Apple have ePub with differing DRM, and Amazon has their own format (mobi-like).
Maybe the way to break out is to support ePub DRM-free, then they'd only support one format instead of 4 separate ones. Perhaps another strong bookseller can come in with their own DRM format and press the issue. The iTunes DRM dominance isn't likely to re-occur here regardless if it's Apple, Amazon, B&N or Sony that is the dominant one.
And perhaps the way to do it is to watermark the books to heck and beyond. Do what Apple does and put personal information in the book - make it visible - perhaps along the edges ("Purchased by John Doe of 123 Main Street, SomeCity, State, 12345. (555) 123-4567. Account jdoe@example.com, credit card Visa xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-1234"). Which would keep most casual sharing off the Internet - those who pirate would've done so anyhow (and those that really work at it can remove the markings). I'm still amused by those who share their music via BitTorrent and all their Apple details are still visible in the files.
I suspect that what they really want is a standardized e-book format that supports a standardized DRM.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I'm not really sure why the want a new format rather than adding to one that already exists.
Sure, html.zip exists, but it has one weakness: no provision for conditional access.
The word agnostic means someone who believes it's impossible to know whether God exists or not. It does not mean a device
...debating the existence of God.... ...one of the devices in question is from Apple...
There's a really great joke in here somewhere, and I just can't find it.
Use html. It can handle text and images, even video, it's quite well understood, everybody knows how to interact with it.
Agreed, one format to rule them all.
But! The biggest problem I have with the eBook is you are askprobe pay a similar price as a paperback book but you never own the material. I had not paid much attention to ebooks, just some casual tinkering with the kindle app. But when I bought an iPad I became interested. Wnd then Apple updated iTunes and I read the EULA!!
Ebooks are not sold to a customer, they are licensed.
It ides not matter if the format is the same, if the publisher decides they will turn off access to the book you purchased. Now this goes against all good intentions of exchange IMO.
What does your wife, the New York Times best selling author, think of this?
This really is the right way to combat the massive piracy while not harassing people who want to backup their media, put it on more than one device, or possibly lend/give it to a friend or two. The fear of massive distribution would scare people off putting it online. Of course you want to make it known to the buyer that it contains watermarks, but not what kind.
Sure people /could/ remove them if they learned how, but they will be too lazy. Everybody wins.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Your mind has been caught by a false dichotomy with your suggestion that the only possibles choices are completely unfettered relationships between various book content items and absolutely fixed relationships between every content item within a book.
I find it most odd that Adobe also (apparently) is stuck in the same mindset even though they were the first company to present a solution to the problem of "reflowing" fonts for mixed presentation sizes. If you thought some book authors are sticklers for the layout/flow of their books, they're like freshman slobs compared to typographers. Both PostScript and OpenType (nee TrueType) solved this design pattern long ago for "reflowing" fonts to look as the author wants them to across a wide range of presentation sizes and using a minimum of additional file size.
So WTH hasn't Adobe designed the ePub file format to support a set of layout hints to allow book designers to deliver content which can smoothly reflow for a wide variety of page sizes while preserving those layout elements which are essential or at least important to conveying the information?
Perhaps Adobe believes there is no commensurate artistry within the world of book/publication layouts that is comparable to typography. Or perhaps Adobe has simply lost their own artistic soul and been taken over by engineers and bean counters.
And it ain't gonna happen
I think there is a chance it might happen because it is a slippery slope to produce devices that only read one format. While every distributor may have a long term goal of a monopoly, there will always be a short term temptation to have your device read more formats (e.g. Kindle started supporting pdf), and to help other devices read content of your format.
I feel obliged to correct myself. Apparently Penguin's dispute with Amazon is now settled.
Eh? What was that again sonny?
Yeah there's an analog hole, but hey, you could go to the library and scan the books there too.
html and micro data format will do the trick.
The way browsers are going they will use less battery power than any native app, because so much grunt work has been done on html browsers to make them efficient.
Exactly. And the irony is that because they are so short sighted, they will not agree on any standard DRM format, which will thus encourage "piracy" even of works you've paid for, since maybe you want to be able to read it on your iPad as well as your Kindle.
How *dare* you!
expandfairuse.org
Only one type of DRM to crack. Convenient!
I don't know what eBook readers, if any currently, use Linux as a platform OS but eBook readers would seem to be an ideal hardware application for it.
The problem is, as usual, that companies like Amazon are not going to release DRMed client readers for Linux (as has been the case for the software Kindle client which has been released for Windows and Mac) because of the "perils" of the GPL and because Linux is an open hackable platform.
DRM on music has pretty much died a death now so Linux can play it, but if Linux cannot be made to support whatever new universal format is chosen, then surely this creates a very dangerous precedent where only a handful of proprietary eBook reader creators (Apple, Amazon and Sony) control access to the vast majority of eBooks, with no possibility of other manufacturers not getting a look in on eBook readers because there's no way they can afford the R&D costs of developing a new platform OS from scratch that is closed and supports the chosen DRM ebook format.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
HTML.
One of the main reasons why the music industry did that was because the music stores weren't playing nice with each other. If you had an iPod you were more or less stuck with the ITMS and if you didn't have an iPod good luck buying anything from the largest online music store in business. The implementations were buggy and tended to not play well with various computers.
They could fix a lot of that and possibly make it work. But betting that it's going to reduce piracy rates sufficiently to make up for the costs of implementing it is more than a little dubious.
In that case, use DVI for binaries and LaTeX2e for raw ASCII.
An outfit called River Technologies is doing just that:
http://river-valley.tv/tex-as-an-ebook-reader/
http://river-valley.tv/tex-as-an-ebook-reader-2/
They actually take the ePub file and render it to TeX/DVI in the background (which can be done quickly on the iPhone (originally coded in early 2009)), and use a DVI viewer to show it on the screen.
The problem with distributing DVI is that everything is set 'in stone'. You can't change the typeface or the font size: the best you can do is zoom in and out. By doing a ePub->TeX/DVI translation on-the-fly (which can be cached so it only has to be done once), you can distribute the text in a layout neutral format, and let people choose the typefaces and font size as they see fit.
This way you can have one file, and allow the Kindle to render text as it sees fit for e-ink screen, while Apple's product can use the best rendering for their LCD screen. When OLED comes out the renderers can display the pixels appropriately for those screens.
I want a tablet device that is 8.5x11
Hope there's one to buy within the next two years.
I think PDF is the format to go with. The evince pdf reader application works well and runs on windows and linux these days. It adapts well to reading A4 paper format or 8.5X11 inch format. There are "fit to screen width", "fit to page", zoom-in, zoom-out services available that can be bound to the new multi-touch pads or to standard mouse or keyboard accelerators.
I tried reading and creating a pdf document on smartdevices smartq 7 a while ago and it works well, but it's a bit slow to display a page because it's focused on saving battery power. Most portable first-generation e-book readers are slow to render a page to save on device battery life.
If I want to print a page, evince and cups printer device drivers work well with epson, hp, lexmark printers from my own personal experience.
I think the publishers are just looking for an excuse to build-in some kind of DRM(digital rights management) into some kind of new format. Good luck with that. Consumers won't go for it.
Much sounder than PDF methinks, but nobody bothers with it. :P
There are several thousand self published books. How do I wade through that sick spew looking for the one I want to read? A publisher is nothing more than a filter who has to paw through the filth I don't want to read to get to what I want to read. I choose publishers based on their output before I choose authors.
I've read self published crap and for the most part it's garbage. No 'reviews' or 'scoring' systems don't really work as they can be gamed. A publisher that can't filter out crap goes out of business.
I am defining publisher as "Pays for writing" not one that gets "Paid to spew some wannabe's crap".
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
So... HTML with images and/or with CSS support, which permits, if necessary, pixel accurate rendering of any output, that's no good?
Rich Text Format (RTF) works for 99% of recreational reading. Have they even stepped foot inside the fiction section of a library since 1950?
Way to have a solution looking for a problem. Fools.
fuck it in it's faggot ass.
This will happen when the publishers actually band together, in unison, and demand... oh wait, isn't that an attempt to control or manipulate a market?
I guess it's not gonna happen, and as much as it might sound like a good idea, it's not. Locking into a single convention might serve the publishers ideal, but history shows that it will only stifle innovation. AT&T's monopoly didn't bring us TCP/IP. As a matter of fact, they resisted every use of their network by any outside innovators until they were legally required to allow otherwise.
Why is this even a question amongst all you 'techies'?
I cannot believe they are so worried about format as their big mistake. They have already made the mistake and that was equating ebooks to hardcover books in order to justify jacking prices to the Moon. Publishers think that since the ebook costs less than a hardcover that it's a deal - sorry it's not. I cannot trade, share, sell, or easily annotate an ebook. Likewise expecting ebook sales to support pulp sales is a huge mistake and they are making that too - they said as much by justifying high prices by talking about how much it costs to PRINT books.
Folks, a single ebook is about 500K to download. If you do not price that thing appropriately it's going to get pirated to hell and back. At the prices Amazon WAS charging I was buying more books than I had in years and loving life. Now books are being held back and prices are near double for many books. People don't upload just one book they upload entire author catalogs and it takes minutes to download a life's work.
After all that the industry is worried about FORMAT being a big issue? Holy shit! What a bunch of clueless fucks. They are doomed to repeat EXACTLY what the music industry has suffered if not worse. http://blog.macmillanspeaks.com/ Read that blog, what a pile of self serving steaming manure. Macmillan lead the charge for higher prices, they can now reap what they have sown as folks find alternative means with little trouble.
There's one bright spot. Authors are waking up to the fact that they can sell on their own. they can sell to Amazon, they can sell to Apple, and they can make MORE money and sell for LESS. Anything $1.99 to $9.99 and the author gets 70% - that's huge. Books rejected by NYC big publishing are finding a welcome home on these services. The ebook market is a mess and the fact that the big publishing houses think they have much pull is a joke. This is getting sorted out without them, they can whine and cry all they want but they are farting in the wind. Get the price issues solved and give more to the author or get run over... http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ Read the author blogs like that one, especially read the comments from other author's. They see the light, big publishing has their heads up their asses.
My hat's off to Calibre for making format the least of my issues to worry about....
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Books that are all text can be just plain ASCII, or even HTML. Magazines, with all their pretty pictures and layouts, should have a typesetting format perhaps like pdf. No need to force a one size fits all on this.
If there are advantages to both ePub and PDF, why not just create readers that can use either format? One for good text and one for good graphics.
The word "agnostic" has taken on a colloquial meaning that it does not have a specific requirement. In the same way that an agnostic person does not care whether god exists or not an agnostic program/format does not care which platform it is run under. Language is a living thing and it changes constantly, there is not point in whining because you cant keep up with that change.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I will never invest in a book reader until one issue is resolved. If they are going to charge ~$10us for an e-book, I must OWN my copy. That means I better be able to port it to the reader of MY choice any time I choose. If they expect me to purchase my entire library again when I move to a new/better e-reader, the books have to cost MUCH less than the current price levels. I don't want the Kindle version, or the Nook version, of their damn book. I want MY version that can move anywhere I need to read it.
Reviews by competent and trusted sources. Like a sci-fi magazine that you enjoy, or the NYT.
The filter should be professional critics, not publishers.
Even if it was possible to have a 100% effective DRM (and it's not), it's still friggin human readable text (otherwise you're doing it wrong). Someone with Notepad can bypass all your restrictions just by using his eyes. So forget about DRM, it's ultimately useless and if it's too irritating then people will get the format shifted ones instead of what you're trying to sell = lost sales.
The goal for a universal ebook format should be:
- to take up as little space as possible, yet be fast to display or search.
- no matter what screen size you have, it should display correctly, and easily adjustable via a zoom feature.
- if somebody decides to make their own ebook it should be easy without specialist software.
- it should allow meta data like blurb, author, keywords, cover, etc.
- handle images well, both scaling and implimentation in a way that doesnt render the source unreadable to humans.
Simple solution: support both ePub and PDF. The first is reflowable and suitable for text oriented content. The second is great for graphics and other content that needs precise control over layout. Both formats support adobe DRM, to keep vendors happy, and both are also open and thus suitable for public domain content. Finally, practically all ebook readers (except the Kindle) already support both these formats.
These formats aren't perfect, but good enough.
Don't need a committee to figure that out.
assignment != equality != identity
great - another syndicate founded to restrain legitimate trade.
I can see the story, oh no you can't
"Western Civilization looses all knowledge in DRM snafu"
PDF is not an eBook format - it's a publishing format. PDF is the total opposite of an eBook format:
1) And eBook format should be light weight, easy to implement on small devices. PDF is the opposite.
2) And eBook format should support re-flow to work on different screen sizes. PDF is specificity designed for support exactly one target size.
Suggesting PDF means you have no idea whatsoever about the issue at hand. Bit like suggesting that Mack should join the formula one.
Actually ePUB is XHTML in a zip file
PDF can re-flow and rescale.
Not modified HTML, just plain XHTML.
So how is that different from the suggestion from the first post?
PDF is not an eBook format - it's a publishing format. PDF is the total opposite of an eBook format:
1) And eBook format should be light weight, easy to implement on small devices. PDF is the opposite.
2) And eBook format should support re-flow to work on different screen sizes. PDF is specificity designed for support exactly one target size.
Suggesting PDF means you have no idea whatsoever about the issue at hand. Bit like suggesting that Mack should join the formula one.
And living in a country where we don't actually use plain ASCII I find pain text is not all that helpful either.
Calibre makes this discussion somewhat moot.
I personally use it to convert between different formats, whether I'm on my netbook, reader, or cellphone.
"The company's president, Susan Petersen Kennedy, explained that book publishers did not want to 'make the same mistakes as the music industry, which had an epic struggle over electronic distribution and piracy and lost huge market share.'"
I know someone who published a book. It was leaked to PDF somewhere between final copy and printing/binding, AFAIK before the publisher had plans for an ebook version. The point of this is that you can standardize any format you want complete with restrictive DRM up the ass, but it's not going to do you a bit of good when your own company is the one leaking the product in the first place.
What you need is the ability to define the content semantically to identify the content, to style the content, and to allow resizing, reflow, etc, based upon the viewing device. In addition a reality is that publishers will want DRM.
A format that is basically HTML doesn't have the semantics. You can extend/bastardise the HTML to include <chapter>, <footnote> , and so on - normal HTML renderers would ignore them, dedicated readers could use them.
PDF is just horrible for eBooks, unless you really really don't care about semantics, restyling, reflow, usability, etc, and just want the pages presented as pages as published. Obviously there are some cases where this is useful, however on a phone I might just want to click on an icon (or even better, an embedded reference in the text) to get an image, rather than be forced to scroll around a large document.
I don't think it would take a group of eBook people long to define a comprehensive XML format for books that supports most book formats. Allow hooks in the XML to extend it, and all you need them is support in eBook applications. Oh.
I would imagine an archive format, like ePub, with SVG support for diagrams and .png and .jpeg support for images, is good enough. Add a DRM wrapper and who wouldn't be happy?
Why would they mean DRM when the fashion industry has only just ridiculed the notion as protecting anything?
Because the fashion industry and the IP industry are not the same thing. You can make as many copies of a piece of IP as you like, but it takes a factory to replace clothing, which is really sold not just on style but on cachet. So's IP, of course, but the relevant thing is that if someone copies your clothing IP then they have nothing because it's not the style that sells the garment in the end, it's the tag. Whereas with a book, it's the content that you're after, since it's what you consume. Here's a test: If you have ever worn a garment that you wouldn't get caught dead in today, without being forced to do so by parents or correctional facility or what have you, then you have been a fashion victim, however slight.
The timing suggests they're trying to leverage the fashion world's very public statement, which can only mean that they're wanting to look at solving the problem some other way. Not necessarily a better way or a workable way, but different.
DRM doesn't work for clothes, because it's not necessary. You can't trivially buy a shirt, copy it, and return it. Copying the shirt well requires taking it apart to make a pattern. You can't buy a shirt and then send copies to your friends for free, either, because it's made out of physical materials. DRM doesn't work all that well for media, either, because it can always be defeated, but that's a very different situation. They are very much talking about DRM.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Actually, what's more likely to kill the industry is overpriced electronic versions of books. I sure wish Amazon and others would get it through their thick skulls that I don't want to pay more for DRM-encumbered books than for the dead-tree versions. So while I do have a Kindle, 99% of what I read comes from other sources, such as Baen's webscriptions.net .
So far, I'm seeing a lot of screaming about ePub versus PDF, as if eBook readers were by definition incapable of handling more than one format.
So, why not both? Use ePub for mass-market stuff that can be easily scaled and flowed, and use PDF for technical stuff that needs tight control of the page layout.
'Nuff said.
Regards;
Nobody has mentioned the effect on libraries. The kind that lend books out for free.
It can be resolved, but currently there is a gap.
Books can indeed be made unencumbered with DRM. The author just has to either release it for free intentionally, or get paid through some mechanism that does not require DRM.
In addition, libraries can be established to lend books digitally. They can buy a certain number of books that can be lent simultaneously.
Some questions that need to be resolved:
Lending from one library globally
How long it takes to read a book, in other words can you say a book has been returned to the library within an hour after it has been downloaded.
Is there any reason to enforce scarcity to the point that a user cannot copy a book borrowed from the library for his own use and that of his family and friends, colleagues, etc.? There ought to be no restrictions on allowing the user to keep a copy of the borrowed book on for example a SD card which can be used in any number of devices.
Construction of official repositories for cover images, descriptions, isbn lookups, etc.
APIs and standard formats, e.g. machine understandable descriptions, dewey decimal or the like for the modern age.
Ensuring permanent archiving
Enabling mass self publishing for free, including copyright registration, etc.
Library lending of music, video, etc. in the same way that books are lent. (Perhaps the period during which a book is considered to be borrowed is the length of time of the shortest audio track on a CD, etc.)
Lending of an entire CD or collection, not just one song at a time
Use in education - for example ensuring that students will be able to use a book in a course, etc. Online courseware and free textbooks, etc.
Actively working to drive prices down - Because once a book has been made there is very little cost associated with publishing it digitally, except when needing to maintain a website with errata or downloadable programs / accompanying extensions to the work.
A total rethink on the nasty situation with very expensive textbooks and the power held by ultrareligious constituencies
How to ensure professors, engineers, other professionals, etc. can be compensated in some way to ensure that they will work hard to create wonderful books with lasting value, and keep them updated in the future, possibly ensuring that they are open and unfettered.
An analysis of the amount of money one can reasonable expect to make with a successful textbook, and how to ensure that amount is paid to the author/editor and then actively drive the price down to zero after that amount has been made. This type of action would make DRM unnecessary as the work would be prepaid / paid by stipend and then become free.
How to architect actively open unwalled gardens, and provide incentive greater than the closed garden / single online store / closed format model.
How to be able to make a real digital book that tells you and your systems about itself, i.e. should a book file include some special metadata including an ISBN or javascript code, some standard URIs, etc.? Should a publisher be required to provide certain webservices in order to receive grants to compensate authors when making a for profit book free, etc.
How to keep unnecessary duplicates from endlessly growing, and also ensure one does not lose / delete books by accident.
How to store books and other media, general files, programs, artwork, etc. in one's own collection which is very likely to span multiple computers and disks over the years
How to manage one's collection, merge with that of one's friends or family, maintain it into the future, etc.
Pretty much everyone that's a player beyond Amazon and Apple use ePub...
PDF as an ebook format would be horrible, as many devices already support PDF but anything beyond basic formatiing in PDF ends up looking like complete crap on EVERY PDF supporting device... especially if you need to override settings like font sizes.
There are several thousand self published books. How do I wade through that sick spew looking for the one I want to read.
There are several million websites, billions of webpages. How do you wade through that even sicker spew looking for the one you want to read?
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.
Everybody wins.
In the traditional and fair sense, yes. I'm afraid some publishers see the missed opportunity to sell the same book to the same person several times and killing the used book market as a 'loss'.
Why else miss the obvious solution, right?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
My point is less to do with the practicalities (which you are entirely correct on) and more to do with the fact that they're obviously aiming to borrow some of the attention. If they weren't, they wouldn't have brought this up when attention was going to be paid. But in so doing, they generate a link in people's minds. The average Joe won't consider the factory aspect of things, but they WILL consider whether they're being given what they thought they were being offered. The book industry knows this. Now, whether they will act on that knowledge is open to debate, but there can't really be much question that they've deliberately created the impression that they are talking about a non-DRM system. Of course, they will still want to protect themselves against being robbed blind, but some of the ideas mooted in just this debate (per-customer digital watermarking, for example) would seem to suggest there are possible answers.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Professional critics are pond scum.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
For free content Slashdot and similar websites do fine. For paid content I'd prefer someone whose past choices I can review at no or reduced cost so I can judge whether I'll pay them for fresh new choices.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
how is that different from publishers?
For free content Slashdot and similar websites do fine.
You knew that "slashdot and similar websites do fine" from your mom's womb?
For paid content I'd prefer someone whose past choices I can review at no or reduced cost so I can judge whether I'll pay them for fresh new choices.
Then do the same for ebooks.
Bingo Dictionary - Pragmatist, n. A myopic idealist.