Open eBook Forum Courts Controversy Over Formats 184
Brad Rigby writes "TeleRead's David Rothman is calling for [1,
2] the replacement of the Open eBook Forum by "an honest
trade association" and a related standards body to create an open standards ebook format at the consumer-level. This will benefit publishers, distributors and retailers, librarians,
the open-source community, and most importantly book readers. Largely because of the proprietary
format wars, ebooks have flopped commercially, with only an estimated ten million dollars in sales in 2003. In
addition, OeBF is being held hostage by its Gold Sponsors, including Microsoft, Adobe, and Palm Digital, companies
with proprietary, incompatible ebook format solutions. And to make matters worse, OeBF's president, Steve Potash, runs
OverDrive, a company profiting from this "Tower of eBabel", which, according to David, is an
obvious conflict of interest and the reason why OeBF is no longer living up to the promise of a standard consumer ebook format. Interesting detail:
The OeBF is so focused on promoting its Gold Sponsors that it has yet to speak out against European VATs that will tax e-books but not p-books."
ebooks sound cool (Score:2, Funny)
Re:ridiculous format (Score:2, Funny)
Then we should outlaw the selling of used books!
Re:We already have a standard for eBooks. (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, no you didn't say that. Slashdot trolls already have ASCII anatomical representations in WAAAY too much detail for my tastes!
Re:We already have a standard for eBooks. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Well, this explains it (Score:3, Funny)
the ubiquitous price-drop-to-come (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, wait...