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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."
ePub is a really good choice. Aside from the fact that it's an open standard, it has the option to plug in any DRM the publisher wants to use/write for it. Hopefully they eventually learn better, but since for now they won't settle for anything that doesn't include a DRM option, that's an advantage for it. It's specifically designed for reading books on an eBook reader, including keeping track of where the pages actually change (when reading at different zoom levels). I'm honestly a bit surprised the industry isn't already switching to it.
That said, I'm not fond of the Adobe Digital Editions DRM that it tends to come packed with at the moment on DRM'd books. The required software is not very good quality. The eReader style DRM is at least a lot easier to work with. (Of course, DRM-free remains the ultimate goal; at this point I pretty much only buy DRM-free eBooks anyway.)
One of the problems with epub format is there is no standard drm layer - in a sense thats one of the problems with PDF. PDF is an iso standard, perfectly fine for publication, but allows 3rd party security handlers - you can use Adobe's, or you can use one of a dozen other ones - and that in itself is the big problem with ebooks today.
Personally I'd buy an ebook reader if it was 8.5x11 inches at readable DPI and did PDFs, because that seems a nearly world standard electronic data sheet format.
Um...except for the fact that the rest of the world uses A4 as a standard. The rest of the world doesn't even use inches (that's over 6 billion humans, by the way).
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.
"Bravo" for the Xerox Alto, the first multi-font WYSIWYG editor, worked that way. The text was stored as ASCII and terminated with a control-Z. Following the control-Z was the formatting information. Text-only utilities, like compilers, could read the files as plaintext. Late 1970s technology.