Universal Ebook Format Debated 277
Amy Hsieh writes "A well-known ebook industry expert, Jon Noring, recently wrote an interesting article for eBookWeb, formally calling upon the ebook industry to adopt a single universal ebook distribution format. Right now there's a plethora of essentially incompatible ebook formats, and this format 'babel' is hampering the growth of the ebook industry. In the article, Mr. Noring proposes a promising open-standards candidate which appears to meet a list of basic requirements: The Open eBook Forum's OEBPS Specification. Andy Oram, a Linux programming editor for O'Reilly, wrote an interesting reply to the article that should also be read." On the other hand, Noring's proposal has also met with some skepticism elsewhere.
I dont know.... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is especially true for for factbooks who are often used as reference and not to be read just one time.
So far Ebooks cant beat the paper version in portability, convenience and ease of use.
Paperbook still seems more favorable to me.
Why propose a different standard? PDF!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
I think this was the mistake of the iTunes Music Store. While not terrible (actually slightly better quality) AAC is not as universal a standard as Mp3 or even Ogg. There are WAYS to encrypt and secure those formats. Napster, just before its demise, had figured out how to secure MP3's that were downloaded from it's system.
Survival of the best-marketed, I guess (Score:5, Interesting)
Sadly, there were better (open) formats using better compression and rendering, losing out to closed formats with big marketing push.
The format that ultimately prevails will not necessarily be the best. It'll be the format pushed by those with the greatest marketing skills/budget, and the one which gives them the greatest control over how their works are used.
It wouldn't surprise me if authors are already signing e-book distribution deals which forbid them from releasing in rival formats.
One of these days, the masses will choose software and data formats according to quality and freedom.
But something within me suspects that the Pope will convert to Islam, and the Jews will profess the divinity of Christ first.
SVG (Score:3, Interesting)
What ebooks really need to take off... (Score:3, Interesting)
The nice thing about a book is that it doesn't have a power switch - it's actually relaxing to sit there and read it.
If it were possible to obtain a high speed printer capable of printing out "e-books" in the same form-factor as a normal book (ie double sided pages, standard size, neatly bound) then I for one would pay for *lots* more books (and paper, and ink.)
How about WAP? (Score:3, Interesting)
Is Project Gutenberg and a Palm Pilot.
I would like to put up a server to serve up Gutenberg, etc. a page or so at a time for low-end WAP phones, with simple indexing and serching capabilities. The simpler cell-phone is what I really always have in-hand with good connectivity when I would like to read. Palm Pilots never seem to have enough storage to keep whole books or widespread connectivity.
Ha anyone done this? It should be popular and not too resource-intensive.
eBooks and DRM (Score:3, Interesting)
Take 2 minutes and read this article from RMS
Right to Read [gnu.org]Exactly (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Better readers needed (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it's a big waste to invest in a dedicated reader (that costs significantly more than my Pocket PC btw), but having that functionality in my PPC is just great.
On the original subject, I think a universal format would be a good idea. Between Pocket PC and Palm, there are many PDA users and if publishers could reach a significant fraction of them, they'd probably get a good return on investment with eBooks. Having multiple formats (Palm, MS Reader and Adobe, probably more that I don't know of) complicates this though. I am a little frustrated since I've come across books I'd like to purchase but are for a different formate than what I use (and I don't want to run multiple eBook readers on my PPC, for various reasons). Having a universal format would be great.
Re:I dont know.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Because you might want to read an e-book of something NOT in the public domain, e.g, a current novel, and few authors or publishers are going to render their wares into a format that is going to end up on free P2P. There needs to be some way to ensure that money changes hands.
You were planning on paying for the books you read, weren't you? Or is this all just an exercise in seeing how we can best Napsterize the publishing indutstry?
Re:How about WAP? (Score:2, Interesting)
www.wapnovel.com (Score:4, Interesting)
Expro: I would like to put up a server to serve up Gutenberg, etc. a page or so at a time for low-end WAP phones
I got bored last Christmas and did this.
www.wapnovel.com [wapnovel.com] (WAP or desktop)
There's also an as yet unused discussion group at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wapnovel [yahoo.com]
Suite of formats (Score:3, Interesting)
That needs to be modded Funny.
By my reckoning, MS-Word has had more than 15 different formats in 9 years. I gave up MS-products for Lent a few years ago, but back in the day when my new laptop arrived with MS-Word95 (or whatever it was called), I had to go find MS-Word 6 and resave manually every last word document + metadata in RTF format in order to be able to read them in the new program.
Too bad the data format is tied into specific applications. This is an old archival issue that is fortunately being dealt with by establishing open file formats [eweek.com] and cross-platform applications (staroffice, openoffice, wordperfect, abiword).
HTML caused the WWW, it will be interesting to see what happens with file formats for productivity suites.
Its pre-chosen (Score:2, Interesting)
DRM Capability: Although end-users prefer not to purchase ebooks protected with DRM (Digital Rights Management), publishers are certainly interested in the DRM capability of the universal ebook format. Thus, the universal ebook format must allow inclusion of DRM protection technologies as needed.
Its obvious that the author of that article has no idea about DRM, any slashdotter will tell them that DRM is pointless, if you can read it you can copy it, if one copy gets made a million get made etc.
Even if the publishing companies decide otherwise, everyone else will probably just rip books into HTML or something. Im sure most companies such as Microsoft or Adobe would love to have invented an all-purpose, DRM equipped publishing medium - tough, HTML/plain-text etc. lives on
Re:Why propose a different standard? PDF!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
PDF only meets half the goals IMHO.
You really have 2 types of documents, and the chosen format needs to support them both well. PDF is well-suited to Magazines or other content with lots of graphics where the layout of the page is important. Such content could be standardized one or more standards of 'page size' for this kind of thing is chosen.
The other type of content is more like a novel, where it's just a very plain free-flow of text. Here, it would be nice to have the device render layout, allow the user to up the font size, etc. Something along the lines of plain vanilla HTML 1.0 would fit well. PDF explicitly positions everything, so it would be bulkier and less flexible.
As I see it, 2 formats are needed, one with set layout and positioning, and one for free-flowing text. PDF and a stripped-down HTML would seem to fit the bill nicely.
Another perspective... (Score:3, Interesting)
My wife has a small publishing/consulting company that has taken us 16 years -- and a lot of investment and pain -- to build. She works her butt off gathering the content which she then publishes as print products and CD-ROM "ebooks".
She is devastated when she hears from someone that they've copied one of her color newsletters; made a "backup" of the CD-ROM ebook and someone else "happens to be reading it so I thought I'd call with a question"; and otherwise copies illegally (no...we don't have the funds to pursue them). She had an opportunity to publish a digital product in Asia and another in Latin America but these markets are notorious for buying *one* and suddenly hundreds or thousands appear (I could digress with a personal story when I was at a software company and saw this first-hand...but it's too long).
PDF is the best standard right now. Platform support for everything out there virtually; security; but there is no meaningful method of DRM that would protect a small businessperson AND make it relatively easy to move ebooks from device-to-device (I know that I would hate to have to remember codes from dozens of publishers; be locked in to one machine for viewing; or other cumbersome methods).
However, no protection = no incentive. I don't care if you're an recording artist seeing your music ripped off or someone like my wife struggling to grow a business. Why should my bride travel to Europe and domestically gathering content; pay correspondents and photographers; and publish a product in ebook format that is super-simple to copy and distribute?
This is why I'm struggling so hard with the whole discussion about ebooks; copyright; DRM and fair use. So some how, some way, we've got to come up with a solution that offers some sort of universal ebook format that content producers can agree on and users can live with.
My $.02....
Why I don't e-book (Score:2, Interesting)
Shadow Puppets (hardcover) by Orson Scott Card is priced on Amazon for USD$18.15
Electronic version USD$25.95 (M$Reader and Adobe)
With the e-version the pubisher has no printing costs, no binding costs, virtualy no shipping costs, no warehousing fees, no sales clerks.
Like most everyone, I prefer my books on paper, but there are times where an e-book version would be convenient. But I am not going to pay 4 times the paperback price for the experience.
German GIFT vrs English GIFT (Score:1, Interesting)
Best example is in a German English Dictionary - if you choose the word "GIFT" and try to look it up, just what should you find? You might not like what you find.
Then there is sytantical choices, ie: "I record the record" Which is a noun? Can you pretag, or not? What about the "People from the land of Er" - does the text to speach engine say "Urbidum? or is this the biblical land?
These are *REAL* problems and no they are not solved, a trade publisher (novels, serials, magazines) has a different view then a reference (dictionary) publisher.
If your goal is printed paper - postscript or PDF is fine, but to do syntatically correct search - it is horrible.
Look at the Cellular markets (Score:2, Interesting)
Parent doesn't know what he is talking about... (Score:3, Interesting)
You don't know squat about the SVG format, do you?
If you took 2 minutes to check the SVG-specification [w3.org] you'd see that you are totaly wrong.
Text in SVG is described as... wait for it... ordinary text. The characters are then mapped to glyphs in your SVG-viewer. Just like in MS Doc, or Adobe PDF.
Just to show you the "ultimate bloat" I'll include an example. If you just want an ordinary plain vanilla book this is all it takes.
<?xml version="1.0" standalone="no"?>
<!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/1.1/DTD/svg11.dtd
<svg width="25cm" height="35cm" viewBox="0 0 2500 3500" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1">
<text x="250" y="150" font-family="Verdana" font-size="55" fill="blue">
Insert book text here...
</text>
</svg>
Re:I dont know.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes. However, I want to be sure that I can still read the book
after my original hardware broke or I replaced it with a newer
model from another manufacturer. And even if the publisher and
the producer of the reader have gone ot of business.
When there is a standard for e-books that ensures I can keep
reading em, I'm willing to pay.
Re:The ONLY Universal EBook Format! (Score:4, Interesting)
Those of us who are literate and computer savvy and have seen places other than the USA recognize the harm that reducing printed material to chunks of ASCII does. And far from mere loss of formatting or typographical embellishments much of the meaning of a text is destroyed when run through the chunky sieve of ASCII conversion. Most accented Roman characters cannot be rendered in ASCII. Non-Roman characters cannot be rendered in ASCII. Typographical features such as relative type size, style, and formatting are either lost entirely or reduced to the low-res rendering capabilities of monospaced ASCII. ASCII has no provision for rendering traditional methods of communicating typographically such as small caps, ligatures, distinction between hyphen, endash, and emdash, etc. despite the fact that virtually every printed text makes use of these features.
Digital technology has progressed without our friends at Project Gutenberg. There is an alternative to ASCII which is now standard to all major computing platforms: Unicode. From the unicode.org website [unicode.org]:
Unicode provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language. [unicode.org]
Encoding the PG texts in Unicode would require no extra effort on the part of the PG volunteers (well, those who have moved on from their TRS-80s, anyway).
Why not use technology that attempts to accomodate the typographical traditions inherent in your source material rather than reducing that material to fit an obsolete technology?
And even if you still cling to your belief in the infinite beauty, timelessness, and universality of ASCII, please stop using linefeeds every 70 characters within paragraphs. WTF do you Project Gutenbergers imagine we read these texts on TRS-80s?
I do know (Score:3, Interesting)
That's because a lot of
The main place ebooks beat paperbacks are in density, you can have many ebooks in a single reader, and in searchability and bookmarking. Many ebooks in a single reader doesn't help much if your battery is only good for 4 hours. Searchability doesn't help much either, for pleasure reading, but is very useful for reference books and school books. Bookmarking is good for starting up where you left off, but that is already a solved problem in paperbacks, it isn't a new capability.
The problem is that, at this point in development, ebooks are a *worse* way to read just about anything people buy for pleasure reading.
When the technology develops sufficiently to solve at least most, if not all, of the issues I noted above, I'll look more at ebooks... but until then, I'll stick with paperbacks, because they are *better*.
I'm not so sure about this. Book publishers like the idea of ebooks, because they can build in more limitations than are legal with current physical book publishing. EBooks kill "right of first sale" because they license the work, they don't sell it. EBooks remove the publisher's major gripe about "more than one person reads each copy of a book/magazine". Publishers like ebooks because they can severely limit readers' rights with them, and think they can do it legally, or at least with fewer court hassles.
It's a bad deal for readers/consumers, but hey, that's part of why book publishers like it. It changes the power relationship in the publisher's favor.
Hmm... on reading through this... this has *got* to be -1, Redundant. At least, I hope it is. Karma to burn...