Publishers Campaign For Universal E-Book Format 348
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."
Re:ePub (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.)
Re:ePub (Score:3, Informative)
A link would be good. Here's one for starters:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPUB [wikipedia.org]
Tim O'Reilly agrees with you [forbes.com].
steveha
Re:ePub (Score:5, Informative)
One of the problems with epub format is there is no standard drm layer - in a sense thats one of the problems with PDF. PDF is an iso standard, perfectly fine for publication, but allows 3rd party security handlers - you can use Adobe's, or you can use one of a dozen other ones - and that in itself is the big problem with ebooks today.
Re:RTF (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:It already exists. (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).
Re:ePub (Score:3, Informative)
Plus PDF is only really for fixed layouts, so it's not much use if you want the same file to target both a phone and a tablet.
Calibre - the iTunes of ebooks (Score:2, Informative)
http://calibre-ebook.com/
Re:The standard one (Score:3, Informative)
Congratulations. You just created ePub [wikipedia.org], the existing open ebook standard consisting of XHTML+CSS in a zip container. Welcome to 2007.
Re:ePub (Score:3, Informative)
ePub can handle just about any formatting: it's HTML and CSS. Both Sitepoint and Pragmatic Programmers put out excellent epub technical books with many non-standard bits like code blocks and inline images: no formatting issues.
Re:ePub (Score:1, Informative)
PDF fails miserably when you want to display it on different devices. Try to read A4 page letter on iPhone or (oh, Lord) Blackberry or (shoot me now) on even smaller phones.
ePub can have DRM. And it's not described in standard. Use whatever you want. Also there are other popular formats like FictionBook.
FB2 is pretty portable, but somewhat limited in all sorts of decorations and such. Also fb3 is going to fix it to some extend without losing its portability.
Re:Text + formatting metadata (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.
Re:ePub (Score:4, Informative)
Not only that, but it's already a de facto standard. All more or less popular readers can read ePub books, either out of the box (e.g. Nook, new PRS), or with a firmware update (old PRS) - with the notable exception of Kindle, because Amazon wants to lock you into their own book store. Practically all reader apps for mobile devices (iPhone, Android) support ePub. iPad supports ePub (only?), which might well be the final nail into that coffin. The upcoming Google book store will use ePub.
The DRM aspect is more interesting. While the format itself defines some generic metadata for DRM and such, it doesn't standardize any particular DRM scheme. In practice, though, it seems that everyone who needs it is converging on Adobe's ePub DRM as the de facto standard.
So, the industry has already standardized. Amazon is the only remaining player that actively resists this, but between Apple, Google, and various smaller fish, I don't see how this is going to last for much longer.
Re:Penguin? Interesting (Score:2, Informative)
ePub, TeX, DVI (Score:1, Informative)
In that case, use DVI for binaries and LaTeX2e for raw ASCII.
An outfit called River Technologies is doing just that:
http://river-valley.tv/tex-as-an-ebook-reader/
http://river-valley.tv/tex-as-an-ebook-reader-2/
They actually take the ePub file and render it to TeX/DVI in the background (which can be done quickly on the iPhone (originally coded in early 2009)), and use a DVI viewer to show it on the screen.
The problem with distributing DVI is that everything is set 'in stone'. You can't change the typeface or the font size: the best you can do is zoom in and out. By doing a ePub->TeX/DVI translation on-the-fly (which can be cached so it only has to be done once), you can distribute the text in a layout neutral format, and let people choose the typefaces and font size as they see fit.
This way you can have one file, and allow the Kindle to render text as it sees fit for e-ink screen, while Apple's product can use the best rendering for their LCD screen. When OLED comes out the renderers can display the pixels appropriately for those screens.
Re:It already exists. (Score:4, Informative)
A4 paper is 6 mm narrower and 18 mm longer than the "Letter" paper size [wikipedia.org]
Re:ePub (Score:3, Informative)
ePub is modified HTML. Or rather, it's just strict XML with stylesheets, bundled up into a zip file. That's it. If you can make a web page, you can make an ePub.
Re:Lack of Piracy for books (Score:3, Informative)
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...
Re:ePub (Score:2, Informative)
HTML + MathML + SVG for graphs/diagrams and PNG for the rest should be able to do the job.
Re:ePub (Score:1, Informative)
EPub is from the technical perspective HTML, or to be more precise XHTML. To produce an epub, you make a zip file with the text as XHTML, add images as needed and some XML files, which tell the reader some meta infos about the content and how to navigate in it.
The struggle with modern readers is more the fact, that the rendering engines fail to do their job. Take for exmaple FBreader, a free and open source ebook reader. It renders a plethora of formats, but you have to adjust your settings, to get good output for technical content. I haven't looked after it, but I guess, they do something on their own, to render the text.
I wonder, why modern ebook reader don't use a standard, or stripped down, rendering engine from a browser? That would give the reader a very good, in some cases, perfect output with the interesting side effect, that one would probably can use namespaces other than XHTML, say Mathml, to render for example formulas quite well.
Am I completly on the same track?
Re:ePub (Score:4, Informative)
Re:ePub (Score:3, Informative)
PDF is not an eBook format (Score:3, Informative)
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.
html + xml = xhtml (Score:3, Informative)
Not modified HTML, just plain XHTML.
Re:ePub (Score:2, Informative)
In that case, use DVI for binaries and LaTeX2e for raw ASCII.
There's a reason why TeX variants produce PDF files now: PDF has specific advantages over DVI. Namely, other apps besides TeX are using it, the files are readable outside your particular system far more reliably (ever tried to share DVI files that have any fonts that are not Computer Modern? Expect fun.) The reader software is everywhere, and you can do far more interesting things with PDF.
DVI isn't analogous to ePub. It's analogous to, say, the Plucker format: a program-specific format that was adequate at the time, but the standardised variants have now surpassed it in other areas.