TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Universal formats vs universal readers

By Steve Jordan

The author at rest.

The e-book market of 2009 has had one overriding concern throughout the industry: Can customers read this book? The issue isn’t one of literacy, availability or accessibility… it is one of format. Specifically, a question of the many, many e-book formats competing for dominance in the industry.

When e-books first appeared, it seemed there was almost a format for every e-book. Individuals created their own idea of the ideal e-book format, and custom-crafted readers to translate those formats. New devices, capable of reading e-books, soon had new e-book reading applications designed for them, and new formats optimized for those new devices. After about twenty years, many formats have fallen by the wayside, while certain formats have become overridingly popular in particular regions, or with particular subjects and genres. But the present result is almost a dozen commonly-used e-book formats, none of which can claim real dominance over the others.

As the world of dedicated e-book readers has developed, hardware makers have generally chosen an e-book format to support early on, and optimized their device for that format. A few of them read multiple formats, but until recently, that was the exception, not the rule. Also, until recently, the most popular readers read only one of the more popular formats, and a few of the lesser-known formats. For instance, Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader reads versions of the Mobipocket PRC or Mobi format, and the Sony Reader Digital Book reads the LRF format… but neither of these popular devices reads the other’s format.

This has led to a schism in the industry, pitting consumers’ desire for a particular device against the availability of e-books in the particular format read by that device. Potential readers are forced to choose one e-book market or the other, and often have to forego certain books that are only available in the other market. This fractioning of the industry from the consumer’s point of view has only added to the plodding growth of the e-book market.

Many in the industry have decided that the way to solve this problem is to adopt a universal e-book format that everyone will use. Presently, the ePub format created by the IDPF is the odds-on favorite for becoming the de-facto standard format for all users. It is argued that every reader should be able to read e-pub files, making all e-books available for every device.

This sounds laudable, but it has one problem: There are already thousands of e-books out there, in different functional formats; it would be a lot of work to go back, collect all of those existing e-books, and convert them to another format; and not every interested party will have the interest, or the resources, to do that. In the real world, we would be left with a vast number of unconverted books that would not be readable on these e-pub optimized devices.

We can look to another, similar industry for inspiration. The home computer industry got off to a slow start, mainly because of a lack of standardization among hardware, operating systems and file formats. But when computers began to standardize with popular operating systems and common programs, the industry finally began to take off and thrive. This is exactly what the e-book industry needs to thrive, as well: Standardization. But as we already have a large legacy of existing e-books, and a hardware industry that is still in flux, the logical solution is to provide standardization in the still-developing hardware.

That’s why a better solution is to include multiple conversion engines for every possible format on every e-book reading device. A device that is capable of reading a dozen formats is infinitely more useful than a device that can only read one or two formats, and it provides continued access to those e-books that will never see conversion. Such a device-wielding consumer can buy e-books from any market, if they know their device is sure to be able to read it.

Presently e-book device sellers are too concerned with trying to lock customers into specific formats, and in so doing, prevent the homogenization that the industry needs to move forward… this is the wrong way to go. Offering devices that read many formats, reformat them for optimized display, and offer other features such as attractive designs or intuitive, efficient controls, will be more likely to attract customers and make sales. This would also be the best way to encourage real design innovation by manufacturers, beyond today’s simple manipulation of package coloring and button bezels.

There is presently a large infrastructure of professional and amateur programmers capable of designing format conversion algorithms for various e-book formats. Different conversion engines may reformat text differently, and consumers would presumably have a choice of which conversion engine they prefer: The Adobe engine does a better PDF format on device X, but device Y also has the Powell Mobipocket engine, and I like the look of Powell-formatted e-books. Some of these engines might be licensed to specific devices, or perhaps other engines could be loaded by the consumer onto the device of choice.

However individual engines were distributed, the end result would be a consumer that could choose their reading device for its looks, cost, features, etc, and be sure that they could read any e-book out there, regardless of its format. The fractioning of the industry would be erased in one motion, and the potential for e-books to spread would be more easily realized.