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."
PDF - easy, universal (Score:0, Interesting)
Here's my wish for PDF to be chosen. Unfortunately it seems almost to obvious and easy for the consumer, so I'll not be surprised if some other format is chosen for god knows what reason (tighter digital restrictions most likely).
I have bought a couple of e-books directly from manning.com. All in PDF (I've avoided whatever other digital format they're trying to push). Easy, convenient and excellent value.
I do applaud the publishers for realizing that they need this. Now please don't make another mistake of music industry by making the content loaded with DRM, which only hurt legitimate customers (yes, the music industry has, at least partly, realized that drm has no value-add what-so-ever)
Re:We have one already... (Score:3, Interesting)
2. For all the tree-huggers out there, you can only use paper from sustainable sources.
And the ink? And the diesel trucks shipping it all over? I find that all unlikely.
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.
Slashdotters are just weird. Every day, they drive their car 600 miles without stopping, ten hours continuous, so electric cars are totally useless for them. They only read books in continuous 12 hour stretches, always at the beach in full sunlight, always far away from an electrical outlet.
4. Electronic media is all about "me me me" whereas physical media can be loaned to family and friends, thus encouraging more social interaction.
My oh my, you're hanging out with the wrong crowd, if you think you can't share electronic media.
5. A used book can be given away to a charity or be sold to go towards the price of the next book.
I give away electronic media, and apply my revenue (zero) toward the (free) cost of my next electronic media, if you know what I mean. Seriously, "buying media" is only done as a fan donation or as a hoarder/collector mentality now a days. Welcome to the '10s.
Re:ePub (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...
Re:It already exists. (Score:3, Interesting)
Speaking as someone who implemented the text file handling part of an ebook reader that never shipped, I can tell you that "simple" ASCII is anything but. First, you have to guess the encoding. Good luck with that. Then, you get to guess whether a newline is a paragraph break or a line break. If you decide it's a line break, then you get to decide if a paragraph is indicated by a blank line or a leading tab or spaces. Then, you get to decide whether multiple indented lines in a row are paragraphs or a block indent. Then you get to emit the HTML markup that they should have used to begin with and render the result.
Plain text is about the worst format you could choose for an ebook. And don't get me started on text files that use overstrike for bold/underline. Been there, parsed that. Not fun.
Re:Suggestion: (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder how the typographical types like Knuth and the graphics arts types like Tufte would react to the idea of not knowing how their pages will render.
They generally haven't tackled the problem that HTML was designed for: displaying in a usable form in windows on displays of different sizes, shapes, resolutions, and color capabilities. Most "typographical" standards start with the assumption of a print medium, with known pages sizes and the ability to use any kind of ink. This is fine if the goal is a standard for printed material. It fails significantly for electronic displays, whose sizes and other info isn't knowable at "publishing" time, and will vary for different readers.
When a book is published, the entire run is usually made with pages all the same size, and all readers get a book with pages exactly that size. When a web document is created, it is then downloaded by people with screens of wildly different sizes. The same standard for typography/markup/formatting/whatever doesn't work for both of them.
One of the ongoing annoyances with HTML is all the web sites that subvert the design by forcing specific sizes and shapes of things (fonts, panels, etc) in the document. The result is "pages" that don't fit properly on a lot of screens. We're seeing a lot of that right now with the growing popularity of smartphones and similar tablets such as the iPod. But all the problems with poorly designed HTML fade into insignificance compared to the results of trying to read typographical-standard docs in formats like PS and PDF, which almost always require 2-dimensional scrolling on small screens. If the publishers standardize on one of the older "typographical" standards, this is exactly what they'll be foisting on all their customers.
Those customers would be much better off with HTML as the standard, despite all its problems. And with time, most of the small-screen gadgets will probably have better HTML rendering, which will mostly mean ignoring all the size=, width= and height= attributes, and formatting the content intelligently for the screen that's in the reader's hands. And also letting the reader specify things like fonts to fit their eyes.
Of course, we could have done a lot better with HTML, if we'd ignored the pressure from the "artistic" web design crowd to include all the formatting junk that's so popular with much of the current HTML-editing software, and has the side effect of making the pages not work well on screens different from the large screens used to create the pages.
(It's interesting and instructive to try reading /. on a smartphone. ;-)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Agnostic? (Score:1, Interesting)
English is a really interesting language. Unlike some languages, there's no central body which defines it. Which means that when words start to become used in new ways, if they get used in that way enough then it becomes a new meaning for the word. Studying the history of words is quite fascinating, and is known as etymology. (Not to be confused with entomology).
Re:ePub (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:ePub (Score:3, Interesting)
From a publisher's perspective, why would they want a different file format for their graphic novels than their text-only books?
"But why invent HTML when I could just use PDF for everything?"
Creating a singular format that tries to encompass every kind of media is a perfect route to format hell. The needs of traditional, reflowing text files are *far* different from that of fixed layout, image-based media. Hell, you probably wouldn't even use the same reader software for the two, as the experiences would be so vastly different. So why needlessly convolve the two?
Re:ePub, TeX, DVI (Score:2, Interesting)
Nobody has mentioned the DOCBOOK format, which is specifically intended to store semantic content while allowing the representation to vary depending on the viewer or viewer's device. Thus far, DOCBOOk has received little attention, but as far as I can tell, it is to date the best that we've come up with when looking for standardized storing of structured content.