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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.
*.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.
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"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."
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.
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
The 'rtf' standard is different in every single Microsoft (its creator) application that supports it.
Its not actually a standard more like a collection of formats that closely resemble each other but aren't actually the same in subtle ways that you'll never figure out.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I wonder how the typographical types like Knuth and the graphics arts types like Tufte would react to the idea of not knowing how their pages will render.
They generally haven't tackled the problem that HTML was designed for: displaying in a usable form in windows on displays of different sizes, shapes, resolutions, and color capabilities. Most "typographical" standards start with the assumption of a print medium, with known pages sizes and the ability to use any kind of ink. This is fine if the goal is a standard for printed material. It fails significantly for electronic displays, whose sizes and other info isn't knowable at "publishing" time, and will vary for different readers.
When a book is published, the entire run is usually made with pages all the same size, and all readers get a book with pages exactly that size. When a web document is created, it is then downloaded by people with screens of wildly different sizes. The same standard for typography/markup/formatting/whatever doesn't work for both of them.
One of the ongoing annoyances with HTML is all the web sites that subvert the design by forcing specific sizes and shapes of things (fonts, panels, etc) in the document. The result is "pages" that don't fit properly on a lot of screens. We're seeing a lot of that right now with the growing popularity of smartphones and similar tablets such as the iPod. But all the problems with poorly designed HTML fade into insignificance compared to the results of trying to read typographical-standard docs in formats like PS and PDF, which almost always require 2-dimensional scrolling on small screens. If the publishers standardize on one of the older "typographical" standards, this is exactly what they'll be foisting on all their customers.
Those customers would be much better off with HTML as the standard, despite all its problems. And with time, most of the small-screen gadgets will probably have better HTML rendering, which will mostly mean ignoring all the size=, width= and height= attributes, and formatting the content intelligently for the screen that's in the reader's hands. And also letting the reader specify things like fonts to fit their eyes.
Of course, we could have done a lot better with HTML, if we'd ignored the pressure from the "artistic" web design crowd to include all the formatting junk that's so popular with much of the current HTML-editing software, and has the side effect of making the pages not work well on screens different from the large screens used to create the pages.
(It's interesting and instructive to try reading /. on a smartphone. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
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/
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
Congratulations. You just created ePub, the existing open ebook standard consisting of XHTML+CSS in a zip container. Welcome to 2007.
You missed the fact that many people already have an ebook reader and don't even know it. Do you have an iPhone or iPod Touch? Then you have access to multiple e-readers, from commercial one-store-only readers like Amazon's Kindle, B&N's eReader (reskinned and restricted version of Fictionwise's eReader), or Kobo to open readers like Stanza (the best reader on iDevices by far, though for best iPad support you need to jailbreak and install FullForce). Don't have an iDevice? That's okay. There are e-readers for Android, Windows Mobile, and even Blackberry. If you have a PDA or smartphone, in all likelihood you already have an e-reader.
I also don't think your price discussion is right. Go visit forums like MobileRead and you'll see that many of the posters are actually very price conscious. The current ebook market is in its infancy at the moment and still hasn't come to the realization that DRM-free product will still sell. Until then, the limitations imposed (can't "lend" an ebook like you can a paper book, for example) are pretty obvious to end users and most people are unwilling to pay anywhere close to the price of a paper book for a restricted ebook. (that most ebook DRM has been cracked does not change that fact -- to get the industry to change you have to vote with your wallet, and if you buy DRMed ebooks only to rip off the DRM yourself later the sellers don't see the second half. They just see that they offered DRMed books and you bought them, so obviously people will buy DRMed books).
I first started reading ebooks on a Windows CE device back in 2000, and continued reading on my iPhone since 2007. I got my first eInk reader just this past Friday, and that was only $110 (yay for Woot!). Most of my reading has been free or classic books, with the occasional purchase from Kindle's store. At this point I've pretty much stopped buying paper books.
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.
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.
I feel obliged to correct myself. Apparently Penguin's dispute with Amazon is now settled.
Nobody has mentioned the DOCBOOK format, which is specifically intended to store semantic content while allowing the representation to vary depending on the viewer or viewer's device. Thus far, DOCBOOk has received little attention, but as far as I can tell, it is to date the best that we've come up with when looking for standardized storing of structured content.
I hate printers.
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
eInk is FAR from failed - it's one of the best ways to read an ebook. I don't need a backlight to strain my eyes and I do need long battery life. Kindle, Nook, Sony's reader - they answer this call. Not so much the iPhone of iPad. You're right most of us would rather buy our books and I've bought about 50 in the last 2 years but since the publishers strangled Amazon to force them to allow the publishers to set prices I've not bought a single one. Prices have zoomed straight up as the publishers attempt to support their print business by hardcover pricing ebooks - idiots. A book is a whopping 500K download, an entire life's work can under a Gig. What do you think is happening with these new prices? Not higher sales I promise you... Ebooks are going strong and I'm seeing more and more readers but the publishers are doing their damnedest to kill it. They're going to learn a hard lesson ala the music industry in a big way...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
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.
PDF can re-flow and rescale.
Not modified HTML, just plain XHTML.