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."
ePub (Score:5, Insightful)
Issue solved. Everyone should just listen to me.
Re:ePub (Score:4, Insightful)
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In that case, use DVI for binaries and LaTeX2e for raw ASCII.
Re:ePub (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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.
Re:ePub (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:ePub (Score:5, Insightful)
When you create a PDF, you specify a particular size of the output. It makes sense since PDF was designed for print documents, and print documents are designed for a specific size of paper.
So if you want to use PDFs, then you're going to want to standardize ebook screen sizes and resolutions. That's going to cause lots of problems. Also, if you want to resize the text in a PDF, you need to shrink/grow the entire document since text in a PDF is not designed to reflow. The only way to reflow text in a PDF is to hope that the text is actually embedded and display the text instead-- at which point your pretty much treating the PDF as a plain-text document and losing all the benefits of using a PDF in the first place.
Its a much better idea to use a modified for of HTML (or something similar, designed to be displayed on-screen, to be screen-size independent, and to allow reflow).
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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.
html + xml = xhtml (Score:3, Informative)
Not modified HTML, just plain XHTML.
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Re:ePub (Score:4, Insightful)
"what's wrong with plain old PDF? I know EPUB is good for text, but poorly suited for things demanding a specialized layout like comics, but PDF handles that just fine."
That's exactly what is wrong with PDF format. It is designed for capturing a precise page layout, which is great for moving printed documents around between fast computers with large monitors, but turns out to be terrible for documents to be displayed on ebook readers for several reasons. First, it does not allow text to be reflowed for rendering on smaller/lower resolution screens. Second, it's a very complex format, requiring far more software, CPU and RAM to render than is required to render a book that is primarily text.
This is why ePub was invented - it's a simple markup language that can be easily implemented on low-end hardware, and which supports reflowing text.
different screen sizes. (Score:3, Insightful)
PDF can re-flow and rescale.
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I'm really not sure why or what value the consumer sees from the use of proprietary formats. Simple is good, universal is good. DRM, proprietary formats and format wars are all bad.
Every Ebook I have is either in RTF, TXT, or HTML format. I have yet to f
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:5, Insightful)
If it has the option to plug-in any DRM then the problem isn't solved at all.
What good does it do me to buy a book that uses this wonderful universal format, only to find that it is wrapped in DRM that only works on one platform?
Re:ePub (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:ePub (Score:5, Insightful)
Issue solved. Everyone should just listen to me.
Issue not solved.
It seems to me that the main complaint about ePub is that it is text-centric, and doesn't do well with any book that requires a particular formatting, or includes anything other than text. That means no comic books, obviously, but it also eliminates many Kurt Vonnegut novels, among others.
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It seems to me that the main complaint about ePub is that it is text-centric, and doesn't do well with any book that requires a particular formatting
That's what PDF is for. An ebook format should explicitly *not* allow for fixed layouts, as it interferes with reflow on mixed display sizes.
That means no comic books, obviously
Comics belong in a completely different format. They should be stored as pages of panels plus page-level layout with graphics, with the user having the option to view the original, ful
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But wouldn't it make sense to have one format that has the flexibility to handle different types of books? From a publisher's perspective, why would they want a different file format for their graphic novels than their text-only books? Why would they want to sell certain authors who happen to enjoy playing around with the layout of their pages separately from all the rest?
I'm not saying ePub isn't a good starting point, but to have the "issue solved", as the original poster stated, it needs a bit more flexi
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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
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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.
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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, 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: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.
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.
Suggestion: (Score:2)
HTML
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HTML
Which of the eighty nine thousand variations?
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Any of the eighty eight thousand variations that modern web browsers and handle.
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Any of the eighty eight thousand variations that modern web browsers and handle.
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.
Yeah for pot boiler romances no problemo, but some folks will have a cow at the idea that their page might be formatted into something they literally can't imagine by a device they know nothing about.
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For Boones and Mill-type books, it not only doesn't matter what it renders like, it doesn't matter if the pages are in order either. Nobody reads them for the plot. I'd argue LaTeX/DVI or Postscript, as then all devices (from speech synthesizers to graphical displays) will work.
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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
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The standard one (Score:2)
http://www.org/ [www.org]
H.T.H.
Course it should probably be zipped as well.
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Congratulations. You just created ePub [wikipedia.org], the existing open ebook standard consisting of XHTML+CSS in a zip container. Welcome to 2007.
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Meh. For ebooks, I'd say modern HTML is overly-complicated. If you were going to use HTML, you'd want a customized version that took away anything not relevant to ebooks (e.g. forms) and then add back in special ebook features (e.g. better pagination support). So really what you'd be talking about is some kind of XML that has been optimized for ebooks and, for familiarity's sake, resembles HTML. AFAIK that's kind of pretty much what EPUB is. May as well use that? Some people are already using it, whic
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I see your HTML and raise you an X.
It already exists. (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.
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No kidding. ASCII is the universal format type, and unicode ain't far behind these days. If you want renderings, fonts and so forth preserved, then there's PDF. Why would you want to build some other format when just about every computer released in the last 10 to 15 years can read these formats?
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.txt is not supported by the Nook.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/features/techspecs/index.asp [barnesandnoble.com]
Dumb I know...
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You're kidding, right? PDF is a document format designed to preserve the layout of a paper book. It doesn't reflow for different screen sizes. At all. This makes it less than useless for the current eBook market, where you have a hojillion different devices, each with its own display resolution, dimensions, and layout format.
And encoding text characters (the job of ASCII and Unicode) is just one of a million different things that need to happen to communicate information through text. If we'd listened to yo
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Now, granted, there are many things -- magazines, scientific journals, etc. -- that don't TXTify very well. But if you're just reading a Dan Brown novel or something, why do you need anything more complicated?
You've never read a fiction book that used italic to emphasize or otherwise mark certain text parts?
Re:It already exists. (Score:4, Insightful)
In my home country we don't use ASCII any more. We just like our äöü and you need at least ISO_8859-1 for that. And wife would need ISO_8859-5 for her eBooks. You guys from the US are so inconsiderate.
And as for PDF: PDF preserves to much and is therefore unusable for different screen sizes.
Re:It already exists. (Score:4, Insightful)
(or *.pdf, if you're a stickler for pretty graphics).
PDF is an epic fail if you're rescaling to a new "paper" size. And each reader is, of course, a different size.
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.
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Turn your laptop sideways and rotate the on-screen display. Today's wide-screen laptops have to be better at something!
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I find PDF to be epic fail on everything. Maybe it isn't irritating to read if you send it to a publishers and have them print and bind it for you? Give me .txt and let me size and wordwrap it as it suits the display device (or window) i am using at that moment.
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).
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Between A4 and Letter, it is actually feasible to simply rescale the page to fit, without reflowing. The difference is minor enough that it won't affect the presentation in any noticeable way.
Re:It already exists. (Score:4, Informative)
A4 paper is 6 mm narrower and 18 mm longer than the "Letter" paper size [wikipedia.org]
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Ebooks in plain text are a bit of a pain in the ass - how do you break up paragraphs (one paragraph per line? Separated by a blank line? First line indented? Tab or space indent?)? How about chapters, and larger divisions (parts, books)? How does your plain text ebook include the author and title of the book in a way your ebook reader can extract? A format with a little bit of structure and metadata is a real improvement over plain text.
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It's called ASCII. And it's great!
Combine it with an expanded ansi screen driver (more color range) for nice color "text graphics", and the ability to switch the color palette to something that gets rid of that ugly cyan and magenta, and you're good to go.
But of course once you do that, it's "too" universal - there's no reason that people would prefer your version over anyone else's.
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UTF-8 unicode. ASCII compatible, more or less, with the full unicode set when necessary.
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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
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TXT is fine if that's what you're after. Many customers want a bit more and I can't blame them.
PDF is not even close to being a usable generic ebook format: Try reflowing a PDF based on your screen width.
Still, you are right that there's no need for a new format -- or at least Mr Shanks should explain what he needs that's not available in ePub.
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More like .docx
I'm kidding, calm down.
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Laughingstock of the world (Score:4, Insightful)
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."
Well shit, even the book industry is laughing at the music industry now.
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After the fashion industry laughed at the music industry, it seemed impossible the music industry could fall any lower in the eyes of the world.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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If they mean DRM, then they should take a second look at the music industry, which dropped DRM more than a year ago.
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I mean, what exactly would be the retailer's motivation? There is none. If anything they would readily acknowledge it would hurt them. So why would they go for this?
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Right. The fact is, you can make a reader that reads multiple formats, so that's not *really* the problem. I mean, creating hardware or software to read the books is a hell of a lot more convenient when you've standardized things, but the real problem that makes vendor lock-in an issue is DRM.
If they really wanted to avoid the mistakes of the music industry, they would drop DRM immediately and move towards making extremely convenient distribution, storage, and backup. That's how you maintain some measur
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Why would they mean DRM when the fashion industry has only just ridiculed the notion as protecting anything? The timing suggests they're trying to leverage the fashion world's very public statement, which can only mean that they're wanting to look at solving the problem some other way. Not necessarily a better way or a workable way, but different.
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Not necessarily a better way or a workable way, but different.
Watermark all the images in the books and kick back and have a brew.
The only downside is the server-side processing requirements are greater, and there'd be a way to know who owned a used book originally.
I can live with that. Traditional DRM, not so much.
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This really is the right way to combat the massive piracy while not harassing people who want to backup their media, put it on more than one device, or possibly lend/give it to a friend or two. The fear of massive distribution would scare people off putting it online. Of course you want to make it known to the buyer that it contains watermarks, but not what kind.
Sure people /could/ remove them if they learned how, but they will be too lazy. Everybody wins.
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They mean Digital Restrictions Management. It is a mistake to let them say what they want is a universal format. What they want is some form of control that isn't vendor-locked to a distributor who isn't them. And it ain't gonna happen.
Precisely. It's all about the DRM. If we are lucky this will play out exactly like it did for the music industry. Those fatcats didn't voluntarily stop using DRM - they just got so sick of Steve Jobs and his monopoly control of itunes that they figured dropping DRM was the lesser of two evils. It was either keep DRM and lose pricing control to Jobs or drop DRM and regain pricing control via multiple reseller like Walmart, Amazon. The tv & movie guys have avoided dropping DRM because Apple does not
pdf (Score:2)
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Nope. It doesn't account for differently-sized screens with different aspect ratios, nor the desire for differently-sized text. PDF is really designed for a set display size.
A crippled standard, he means (Score:3, Insightful)
"Oh, and don't get me wrong, we already have good standards, but they don't suck enough. By that I mean they don't arbitrarily restrict our readers in stupid ways. I long for the day we have a universal sucky e-book format."
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"Oh, and don't get me wrong, we already have good standards, but they don't suck enough. By that I mean they don't arbitrarily restrict our readers in stupid ways. I long for the day we have a universal sucky e-book format."
How about ".docx"? That would be freaking lovely. Seriously. I'm surprised he didn't suggest it.
Either that or F all those unicode guys and their multicultural junk, I'm using EBCDIC. And when it doesn't sell, it'll be proof "no one wants ebooks" so we'll just can that market.
PDF? (Score:2)
Duh?
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Wow, way to completely miss why ebook formats exist in the first place.
Let me guess... you don't actually read ebooks, do you?
Dream on... (Score:3, Insightful)
"...First we have to get a standard that everybody embraces..."
Good luck with that...if the battle with HTML 5 is any indication. Heck, what about document formats? Good luck with that too!
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
Doesn't E-Ink displays only require power when you change the picture, aka turn the page?
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6. Printing books has a long pollution consequence chain, from the paper mill onward.
7. Electronic media are great for giving to friends. I email .pdf manuals quite often. Did I mention "no packing or postage"?
8. I can carry many electronic pubs on my USB key. No one steals my electronics at airports because I hand-carry them too.
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1. Someone will steal an iPad or eBook reader from your bag at the airport, not a dog-eared paperback.
On the other side, you have to carry the dead weight of some paperbacks in your luggage, instead of just one light eBook reader.
2. For all the tree-huggers out there, you can only use paper from sustainable sources.
How exactly do you do that? I mean, if you don't happen to be the publisher of the book.
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
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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 app
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Same mistakes (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't want to make the same mistakes, and yet they're following the same path anyhow.
DRM DOES NOT WORK.
If someone tried to sell me a security measure that encouraged thieves to attempt to steal my products while preventing my legit customers from using them and made everyone angry, I'd tell them where to shove it.
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The goal isn't to permanently lock down the media forever. It's to make it hard to copy during the initial high sales period. Sometimes it succeeds, sometimes it doesn't.
But flatly saying it "doesn't work" is misinformed, not insightful.
Re:Same mistakes (Score:4, Insightful)
Agnostic? (Score:2)
I'm continually amazed at the extreme terminological imprecision of some people in the tech industry.
The word agnostic means someone who believes it's impossible to know whether God exists or not. It does not mean a device which can display book files from multiple publishers. That new usage is not even vaguely analogous to the old one, because it does not connote
It's Easy (Score:2)
Let's get together and call it text. Oh gosh! Somebody did that a couple of hundred years ago.
RTF (Score:2)
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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.
Lack of Piracy for books (Score:2)
I don't think publishing will see nearly the same scope of piracy due to the nature of their customers (well read, well heeled. educated, and generally able to afford books). Also, any idiot can put together a few microchips a battery and a headphone jack with a digital watch display. The internals of an ebook reader are about the same as an MP3 player, but you need a decently high quality screen and great battery life to really use pirated ebooks. The vast, vast minority of people read entire novels in the
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You missed the fact that many people already have an ebook reader and don't even know it. Do you have an iPhone or iPod Touch? Then you have access to multiple e-readers, from commercial one-store-only readers like Amazon's Kindle, B&N's eReader (reskinned and restricted version of Fictionwise's eReader), or Kobo to open readers like Stanza [lexcycle.com] (the best reader on iDevices by far, though for best iPad support you need to jailbreak and install FullForce). Don't have an iDevice? That's okay. There are e-
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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 s
Making the EXACT same mistakes (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.
Too late, they have already made the mistake! (Score:3, Insightful)
I cannot believe they are so worried about format as their big mistake. They have already made the mistake and that was equating ebooks to hardcover books in order to justify jacking prices to the Moon. Publishers think that since the ebook costs less than a hardcover that it's a deal - sorry it's not. I cannot trade, share, sell, or easily annotate an ebook. Likewise expecting ebook sales to support pulp sales is a huge mistake and they are making that too - they said as much by justifying high prices by talking about how much it costs to PRINT books.
Folks, a single ebook is about 500K to download. If you do not price that thing appropriately it's going to get pirated to hell and back. At the prices Amazon WAS charging I was buying more books than I had in years and loving life. Now books are being held back and prices are near double for many books. People don't upload just one book they upload entire author catalogs and it takes minutes to download a life's work.
After all that the industry is worried about FORMAT being a big issue? Holy shit! What a bunch of clueless fucks. They are doomed to repeat EXACTLY what the music industry has suffered if not worse. http://blog.macmillanspeaks.com/ [macmillanspeaks.com] Read that blog, what a pile of self serving steaming manure. Macmillan lead the charge for higher prices, they can now reap what they have sown as folks find alternative means with little trouble.
There's one bright spot. Authors are waking up to the fact that they can sell on their own. they can sell to Amazon, they can sell to Apple, and they can make MORE money and sell for LESS. Anything $1.99 to $9.99 and the author gets 70% - that's huge. Books rejected by NYC big publishing are finding a welcome home on these services. The ebook market is a mess and the fact that the big publishing houses think they have much pull is a joke. This is getting sorted out without them, they can whine and cry all they want but they are farting in the wind. Get the price issues solved and give more to the author or get run over... http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com] Read the author blogs like that one, especially read the comments from other author's. They see the light, big publishing has their heads up their asses.
My hat's off to Calibre for making format the least of my issues to worry about....
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Easy, universal, and a terrible format for a world where people have different screen sizes and want different size fonts.
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Uhhh, no. And most character sets don't render into 127-character standard ASCII anyway. You couldn't even do English correctly, owing to the special-cases where overlapping characters are used.
Re: (Score:2)
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.