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Publishers Campaign For Universal E-Book Format

Posted by Soulskill on from the they-also-want-a-pony dept.

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."

8 of 348 comments (clear)

  1. ePub by masmullin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Issue solved. Everyone should just listen to me.

    1. Re:ePub by Nakor+BlueRider · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.)

    2. Re:ePub by elh_inny · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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...

  2. It already exists. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    *.txt

    (or *.pdf, if you're a stickler for pretty graphics).

    Coming up with a "new standard" at this point is just wasted effort.

    1. Re:It already exists. by angus77 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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).

  3. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  4. Making the EXACT same mistakes by CritterNYC · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  5. Re:Text + formatting metadata by Animats · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.