E-book biz headed toward a replay of the word-processing battle between Microsoft and WordPerfect?
Steve Potash, re-elected to the board, remains president of the International Digital Publishing Forum, formerly the Open eBook Forum. Here’s a list of current board members following an election.
Missing from the IDPF board is Microsoft. Could Microsoft no longer consider the IDPF worth worrying about? If I were Bill McCoy, Adobe’s new rep on the IDPF board, I wouldn’t get too smug. Microsoft may count far, far more in the end than he could ever envision.
The IDPF is hardly the complete universe or the ultimate judge. Benjamin Graham, a hero of Warren Buffett, Bill Gates’ bridge-playing friend, once said that the stockmarket in the end is a weighing machine, not a voting machine. Oh, how that could apply to IDPF and its politics. What counts ultimately for formats will be the extent of their appeal to consumers and the resultant revenues for adopters–not who cares to run for the IDPF board, or even who wins. That’s why I’m upbeat on OpenReader, a truly open alternative that could kickstart the toy-sized e-book business, given the format’s many virtues and the growing sophistication of publishers. Meanwhile, if forced to limit my bets to Microsoft and Adobe, I’d choose the former.
Here’s one gloomy possibility followed by a better one. The smaller Proprietary Formatters within the IDPF will wear each other down, reducing the battle to one between Microsoft and Adobe. Yes, Amazon owns Mobipocket, but at least if the programmers stick to their present brain-dead format, Jeff Bezos will have bought himself a loser.
Ultimately, in this scenario, Microsoft will triumph with a format of one kind or another–just as it walloped WordPerfect, which, in its Corel incarnation, now enjoys a fraction of billg’s marketshare in the word-processing area. But meanwhile the e-book business will have taken a real beating, given all the confusion that the proprietary-format approach creates for customers–in fact, even BusinessWeek. The pie, the prize, will have shrunk.
Of course, we’re talking about the battle among Proprietary Formatters. What if OpenReader catches on? We’re getting wonderful responses to our vision, from key members of the e-book business. So will consumers feel the same, and what about Microsoft? Well, which would you rather own–books in an open format, or ones limited to a certain operating system or systems and without the most consumer-friendly DRM? (Reminder: standards-setters will decide OpenReader’s DRM even though OSoft has proposed a rather innovative solution.)
This more optimistic scenario could end with a happy outcome for most everyone, Microsoft included. Imagine e-bookdom tearing down the Tower of eBabel ASAP, as OpenReader has urged. Let’s rid the business of so many of the uncertainties that now dog tech companies and publishers alike. That’s what OpenReader would do. Competition would still happen, except it would be over feature sets, aesthetics and other aspects of reading and creation programs–as opposed to inventing and reinventing formats to herd customers into. A bonus for Microsoft, with a true open-format approach, is that it could more deeply get into content and other areas without as much exposure to anti-trust risks.
Meanwhile, whatever Microsoft does or doesn’t do, the IDPF will ideally be more open to a nonproprietary approach to e-pub formats than the organization has been in the past. All this talk about a container form is no substitute for a true consumer format with genuine standardization through and through. It’s the core format that counts most of all, not the container. Most publishers would rather not get into grubby technical details (even if they’re smarter about such matters than before); but I would urge them to ferret out the truth about the “container” initiative. It’s most likely a step in the right direction, but far from a complete solution.
Update, 4:30 p.m.: Revised several times to get in more details and possibilities.
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