PC WORLD Ponders the eBook Format Morass

Money quote: "Ultimately, what consumers need is e-books that they can buy and read anywhere, using any software they choose on any device they have at hand, whether it be a phone, a tablet, a laptop, or a PC. No muss, no fuss. This issue is critical to library management and to the future success of e-books."

Why Some E-books Just Don't Look Right

PW: "There are a couple of major issues that need to be dealt with if e-books are to approach print standards. Bud Parr, president of Sonnet Media, a Web design firm that has created Web sites for authors, presses, and organizations, who is beginning to expand his work from the Web to the e-book field, said, 'The technologies that are used to create e-books in EPub are wholly familiar [to me] as a Web developer and designer.' EPub uses the same style sheets, which 'give it its formatting and its visual life,' noted Parr. The main challenge in formatting e-books, according to Parr, is the way different Web-browsers—or, in this case, e-books, e-readers, and e-reading apps—interpret the code and style in an EPub file (Kindle, of course, has its own proprietary file format and style, and requires separate formatting). Because all the apps and devices work a little differently, the same file can look different in iBooks than it does in the Kobo app or on a Sony Reader. This is especially problematic with poetry or e-books with tables, visual elements, or a lot of tricky formatting: an indent, for example, might look right on one e-reader, but not indent enough on another, just because the two platforms are interpreting the same code differently."

Kindle vs. ePub - Which Will Go the Distance?

From Nate the Great, the Digital Reader: "So there’s another ePub activism session going on right now on Twitter, and it inspired this rant. I have a number of points about format, Kindle vs ePub, etc that I want to get off my chest. ... The Kindle format has Amazon behind it. ePub has a committee. When you match a savvy, innovative tech company with a being that has 100 mouths and no brain, who do you think will win?" But Nate cites other reasons as well. And he's on target, as usual.

HTML is Dead; Long Live HTML

From Publishers Weekly, a VERY important interview with entrepreneur Jared Friedman, of the "social publisher" Scribd, concerning HTML5, the soon-to-emerge game-changing update for the Web's lingua franca.

Betting the House on HTML5: "Simply put, because the new features in HTML5 mean that e-books and digital reading can now enjoy all the advantages of the Web. So far, digital reading formats have forced readers to choose between an impoverished Web experience or a frustrating patchwork of proprietary formats and applications tied to specific devices. But with HTML5, we can now display written works digitally in a way that is enjoyable to read, that retains the distinctive appearance of a work's original design, and that takes advantage of everything the Web and our mobile devices can offer us. With HTML5, book pages can literally become Web pages as opposed to images encased in a locked-down, artificial frame inside a browser, preserving complex designs unique to documents, books, or magazines, from fonts to images, vector graphics, rotated text, precise positioning. Maybe most importantly, HTML5 e-books are universally accessible. That means publishers get access to the largest audience possible, because HTML is an open standard, supported anywhere. If you convert your content to HTML5, almost any device can read it."

Poetry And eBooks: Will Poems Ever Work In eBook Formatting?

Hillel Italie addresses the question:

NEW YORK — Billy Collins, one of the country's most popular poets, had never seen his work in e-book form until he recently downloaded his latest collection on his Kindle.

He was unpleasantly surprised.

"I found that even in a very small font that if the original line is beyond a certain length, they will take the extra word and have it flush left on the screen, so that instead of a three-line stanza you actually have a four-line stanza. And that screws everything up," says Collins, a former U.S. poet laureate whose Ballistics came out in February. ...

Also check Travis Nichols on the topic of The eBook Ugly Stick.

The Need for an Agnostic Universal eBook Format and Universal DRM

Thanks much to Tim O'Reilly for drawing my attention to this very important Reuters item which comes via Wired:

... Both [Amazon and Apple] want their devices — the iPad and the Kindle — to be the one consumers use to read e-books, and each wants to be the biggest virtual store were such content is sold.

For Michael Serbinis, chief executive of Kobo, a company that allows users to buy e-books and read them on most devices, that battle is a distraction to the real changes coming.

“Today you can buy a book at Barnes and Noble and you can buy a book at Walmart and you don’t have to keep them in separate rooms in your house,” he said. “You buy a book from Apple and Amazon and you have got to keep it tied up with your Apple universe or your Kindle universe.”

Ultimately, consumers want freedom, said David Shanks, chief executive of leading publisher Penguin Group USA.

“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,” Shanks told Reuters. “First we have to get a standard that everybody embraces.”

The issue, he said, is the fear of piracy and how to set a common digital rights management system to thwart it. ...