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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."
..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
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.