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."

Comments

Re:ePub

[elh_inny]

I actually consult for Penguin (but also other publishers so hopefully I am not as biased), I am also on the ePub committee and I must tell that at least in it's current form epub is not the solution to all forms of content.
Also Apple tends to do unspecified things to epub deliveries and standard compliant epubs fail Apple check, but it's hard to blame them yet, they're just trying
Moreover it is the publisher who chooses to wrap their epubs in DRM or not so Penguin, not Apple is causing the incompatibilities to some extent.
Amazon is obviously the biggest offender with their proprietary outdated format which is almost the same but not quite an epub.

I also agree that epub is the most sensible solution right now, but like I said it's not there yet and simply doesn't work for non-reflowable content (think anything rich media, graphic or design heavy) which is a lot of content...

Re:ePub

[TheRaven64]

Unfortunately, the advantages of ePub are the disadvantages of PDF, and vice versa. ePub is terrible for technical content or for anything which is more complex than plain text with a tiny bit of markup. PDF is great for complex books, but for text it's a hugely bloated format. There is not yet a good general solution. For my latest book, I am using a subset of LaTeX markup and have added support in the EtoileText framework for parsing it and emitting XHTML, which works quite nicely for creating the ePub, but this one has much less complex structure than my last one.