The rise of ePub
If you go by Google’s search reports, interest in the ePub standard has rocketed in recent months. Switzerland, Belgium, Brazil, France and Russia and India are Regions 1-6, with the U.S. coming in at Number 7 and the U.K. at Number 8. Here’s a glimpse into Google Trends’ methodology. ePub usage is just a speck of, say, the popularity of Adobe PDF, but graph shows terrific potential.
ePub could be on its way to becoming a true international, multilingual standard, and I hope that publishers industry will not shoot themselves in the foot by cluttering things up with silly DRM-based regionalization schemes. E-books inherently lend themselves to global marketing. Let’s not hurt them by trying to impose paper-book models on them. While I love the idea of regional editions of international best-sellers, let them compete on merit, as opposed to a DRMish approach.
November 30th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
This is great to see!
Here’s to a possible end to the Tower of eBabel in sight!