I agree despite the existence of spiffy new gizmos like Barnes and Noble’s Nook, shown here. The reason isn’t just the expected Apple tablet, which should be good for a bunch of tasks, not just book-reading. My guess is that a slew of e-readers will be out with Pixel Qi technology. PixelQi will let one screen work in an E Ink-style mode (low power consumption, high resolution) or a traditional LCD one (color).

So what does that mean? Well, B&N Nook, which includes a small color screen to go with the E Ink one, might not seem so hot with all the Pixel Qi-based competition I anticipate (nothing definite here, just clues from Pixel QI).

I also wonder about the recently unveiled EnTourage eDG e-reader/netbook, another two-screened creature. What’s the use of LCD and E Ink in one reader if Pixel  QI can handle both modes well well?

Of course, factors such as the number of books available should also matter, not just the capabilities of the hardware.

Amazon might be the winner in the numbers game if you exclude the hundreds of thousands of public domain books that the Nook can access. But that could change and maybe already has if you go by the B&N line.

At any rate, keep in mind the e-book-capable Apple tablet on the way; and besides, a Kindle-capable app should be available for it.

Furthermore, I wouldn’t be surprised if a widely circulated Adobe reader app for the Apple will appear and be able to read books in ePub. A German reader for Adobe-DRMed ePub books on the iPhone has already been announced, one more sign that the ePub standard is winning over large publishers.

What’s more, Adobe and B&N are apparently moving toward a common DRM system for ePub. Amazon may well find it harder in the future to compete with Kindle-only books and may well adopt ePub. With or without Adobe DRM? I don’t know—just that if Jeff Bezos were really smart and wanted to disrupt the competition, he’d back off from DRMed books, the way he did from DRMed music. Or he could use social DRM. If the big houses didn’t go along, Jeff could think seriously about playing up books from more enlightened smaller publishers. Talk about all the changes that just might be ahead, or at least should!

Meanwhile Amazon’s Kindle reading apps for the PC—downloadable in November, with a Mac version coming a few months later—should help you buy a little time, if you’re insistent on reading Kindle-format books but don’t want to buy a an actual Kindle right now.

And for ePub and Adobe-DRMed ePub, Sony offers a desktop reading app for PCs and Macs.

Bottom line: Think twice before locking into 2009 products, at least dedicated e-reading hardware, when the 2010 variety could be so much better. If nothing else, remember that a netbook or general-purpose tablet might be best for you both today and in 2010.

Related: E-book comparison matrix from DealNews, via D.A. Also see Technologizer’s cheat seet (via Reading 2.0 list).

Reminder: DRMed ePub still won’t be an open, nonproprietary standard. Alas, big publishers are still insisting on DRM.

“The proprietary Kindle format is a handicap though that will turn off many users who are waiting for the dust to settle on the ebook standards so they don’t get saddled with obsolete technology like a Betamax video tape machine or an HD DVD player.”

Fictionwise, owned by Barnes &Noble, is moving in the direction of ePub as a core format for its eReader program. Will the hardware reader branded by the parent company (photos) follow? I suspect so. If that happens, Amazon’s Kindle format will appear to be more and more of an oddball approach.

“Now,” Bradley concludes, “if we could just settle on a standard ebook format and get the cost of the devices down around $100 I think the eReader would hit critical mass and make bound paper books obsolete.”

Details: I wish Bradley had discussed the problem of proprietary DRM turning ePub books into those with proprietary formats. Still, it’s good to see him so keen on format standardization. He talks of “Kindle vs. ePub vs. whatever other ebook standard might enter the competition debate.” But for now, I’m not sure if “whatever other” is that big a factor. Maybe that’ll change if Apple comes up with a proprietary standard for its tablet. But remember, third party programs for the tablet will still make it possible to read ePub books on it.

Steve Jordan, a self-published science fiction novelist, has to make lots of decisions. Although most of them involve plot points, narrative arcs and character development, Mr. Jordan has the added burden of deciding how to deliver the stories he creates to his online audience. …

“I’m already selling six different formats on my Web site,” Mr. Jordan said. “If they have a particular format they prefer, they can usually get it from me.”

ePub is the magic that will rescue us from the crumbling Tower of eBabel and give us e-books that Just Work.

Or not.

Here is the experience of a simple-minded publisher who believed what he was told about ePub. Perhaps there are some morals to be drawn. But if I’m not simple-minded, just simple— please correct me gently!

The book I’m formatting as an e-book is a collection of short stories. Here’s a link to one of them, so you can follow my reasoning if you want.

The formatting of these stories has two major complexities:

1. One or two paragraphs have extra space before them, to indicate the start of a new section.
2. There is one limerick, which has to be set as verse.

I’ve been checking my ePub files in Adobe Digital Editions (as a proxy for the Sony Reader), on O’Reilly’s Bookworm web site, and in Stanza on my iPod Touch. The actual XML was also viewed and checked in a standard web browser. I’m sure there are many other possibilities, but you have to stop somewhere. I built the files with Dreamweaver, so as to have full control of all the XML and CSS.

Space before paragraphs

Everyone knows enough CSS to know that the ‘margin-top’ attribute will control the space before a paragraph. Except that in Bookworm it doesn’t, because Bookworm ignores all the CSS in the ePub file (do View > Source if you don’t believe me). And Stanza takes over all the margin settings for its own purposes. Result: a short story that drones on, paragraph after paragraph, with no refreshing pauses to give it rhythm.

For my next attempt, I used the ‘padding-top’ attribute. This still fails in Bookworm, of course, but Stanza doesn’t seem to mess it up. So, victory!

Verse

There was an old man of Zermatt
Who was really exceedingly fat.
···Because we were thinner
···We had him for dinner.
Now what could be nicer than that?

Now what could be easier than that, in typesetting terms? A handful of paragraph styles controlling spacing and indentation, and there you are.

Except: Bookworm ignores the CSS, so we’ll get huge spacing, and Stanza has its own ideas about margins and won’t listen to our CSS, so we’ll get huge spacing. In both cases, a mess.

The cure is to put ‘br’ tags between each line. But even that is not enough, because some readers (such as Adobe) will indent the first line of a paragraph, which ruins the verse spacing. So we have to put a ‘br’ tag in front of the first line as well — which means that there’s an ugly blank space before the whole poem.

So you can’t set verse in ePub without knowing what software is going to be reading it.

Typesetting quality

People who set type for a living spend much of their time slaughtering widows and orphans. Adobe Digital Editions manages to eliminate them, though not perhaps in the most elegant way. Stanza, on the other hand, is a one-man benevolent institution. The last line of a paragraph is frequently left dangling at the top of a page; the first line of a paragraph is frequently stuck at the bottom of a page; and it has a love of hyphenating the last word on a page, even if that leaves only 4½ words of the paragraph floating absurdly at the top of the next page.

Yes, hyphenation… I conduct a running war against malicious publishers who hyphenate “wouldn’t” before the ‘n’, but Stanza goes one better than them. In the sentence ‘And how is the butcher’s meat, Valerie dear?’ Stanza manages to put a hyphen after the question mark and before the closing quote. It looks novel.

The moral of the story

The biggest complaint about the content of e-books today is that the quality is so low. This is not just an aesthete’s whinge. Beautiful text is readable text. It is our duty to our readers to do the best we can in e-books, just as we do in print. But despite all the promise shown by ePub, it fails, in practice, to provide the consistency that we need.

You will say that this is a software question; but I say that there is no software involved. No-one really uses Adobe Digital Editions: they use the Sony Reader or another machine. No-one really uses Stanza: they use the iPhone or the iPod Touch. These things are appliances, not computers. Users have no concept that there is any software there at all — do you know what software powers your DVD player? — and so they have no incentive to put pressure on the software suppliers to make things better.

Even if pressure could be brought to bear, it may already be too late. Suppose you are responsible for maintaining Stanza, and you read this post. What will you do? Correct Stanza to be consistent with Adobe? Surely not. Because that will mean that every existing e-book whose author has tweaked it to work will Stanza will instantly look broken. The losers in any change will notice at once, and make a lot of noise; the winners will not even notice they’ve won.

Evolutionary biology has the concept of a speciation event: when two populations find that it is to their benefit for interbreeding to be impossible. Has this already happened within ePub?

Is it already too late?

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.

SOUTHBURY, Connecticut. August 17, 2009 — Quartet Press announced today that Angela James has joined the company as editorial director.

A native of North Dakota, James’ career in publishing has included ownership of an independent editorial services business, and a position as a copy editor for the electronic book and small press publisher, Ellora’s Cave.

James was most recently executive editor for Samhain Publishing, where she managed the publisher’s editorial services division, and edited more than 50 authors including national bestselling authors Lucy Monroe, Ilona Andrews and Deidre Knight.

James is a well-known advocate for digital publishing, and frequently travels to regional, national and international writing conferences to meet with authors and present workshops on digital publishing for both authors and readers of all genres of fiction.

About Quartet Press
Quartet Press was founded on shared principles to create a high-quality, community-centric, and reader- and author-friendly digital publishing house. First titles will be available in late Fall 2009 through its Quench Romance imprint, with plans to expand into additional categories and service offerings in the near future.

For additional information on Quartet Press, please visit our website: http://www.quartetpress.com

Media Inquiries: Kat Meyer, VP Marketing. m: 520.576.0482; email: kat @ quartetpress.com.

###

–
Kat Meyer
Co-Founder/VP Sales + Marketing
Quartet Press
PO Box 87761
Tucson AZ 85754
520.576.0482
Kat@QuartetPress.com
Twitter: @katmeyer
            @QuartetPress

Thinking about making the leap to digital books? First, you’ll need to add a jumble of new lingo to your dictionary: .epub, pdb, BeBB, and Adobe Content Server 4, just to name a few.

The burgeoning marketplace for e-books is riddled with inconsistent and incompatible formats. That means there’s often little guarantee that an e-book you buy from one online store, like the new Barnes & Noble store, will work on popular reading devices like Amazon.com’s Kindle or Sony’s Reader. …

But Sony’s Epub announcement belies another problem: publishers still want to add digital rights management, or DRM, software on top of most new books. Epub files can’t contain DRM on their own.

For DRM, Sony’s online store will turn to a service from software maker Adobe. Technically, the files are in .epub format, but they can only be opened after getting a green light from Adobe’s Content Server 4 software.

Adobe’s software for adding DRM to books is — no surprise — proprietary …

Of course, there’s an even more elegant solution for all of this format confusion: Publishers, stores and e-readers could just switch to plain-old .epub format books, and let readers do what we want with them. The recording industry eventually dropped DRM from many music stores — although, admittedly, under circumstances in which they had few other options. Apparently, book publishers aren’t yet that desperate.

Besides Sony (“four devices”), the vendors include Astak (three), BeBook (two), Bookeen (at least one—see Christine’s comment), COOL-ER (one—shown here in various colors), Elonex (one), Hanlin (two), Irex (one) and Neolux (one).

On top of the Sony’s eBook Store’s  forthcoming adoption of ePub—not to mention the Sony Reader’s ability to read ePub in the first place—this is good news for standards white hats.

The only fly in the ointment is that Adobe-DRMed ePub is really a proprietary format in effect. As noted separately, I’m more than a little grouchy at the New York Times tech section for downplaying this fact. The section is generally stellar, but when it comes to e-book standards coverage, the NYT is about on par with Judy Miller reporting on “weapons of mass destruction.”

(Via Adobe’s Nick Bogaty, as well as Electric Book Works.)

There has been a lot of discussion as of late regarding the role of DRM in the e-book industry. Many publishing companies have pushed for strong DRM in order to protect their rights as copyright holders. Because replication of digital files is so easy, many fear that unprotected e-books will lead the proliferation of pirated copies. While publishing companies’ desire to protect their content (and their source of profit) is understandable, the current use of DRM carries unintended consequences.

E-book aggregators and distributors have responded to publishing companies’ concerns largely with proprietary file formats and DRM techniques. Amazon’s format and DRM are different than Sony’s, which are different from Barnes & Noble’s. By allowing these competing formats, publishers have given up considerable power in the value chain. Why? Because proprietary formats and DRM increase switching costs for users and can eventually lead to winner-take-all platforms.

Consider a new e-book consumer who wishes to purchases a dedicated e-book reader. Currently, the individual can choose from Amazon’s Kindle, Sony’s eReader, several small brands, and soon the Plastic Logic device. The individual will consider many factors in making the final decision. However, one of the most important considerations will be the future of the device and the library of titles it is connected to and compatible with. If a consumer chooses a device (or simply buys e-books) from a distributor that exits the industry in the future, that device and its files could become all but worthless (witness the Fictionwise debacle in January 2009). With proprietary file formats and DRM, it is very costly for a consumer to pick a loser.

So, how does a consumer sort out the winners from the losers? There’s no fool-proof method. But the danger for publishers comes when individuals employ the following simple logic: The company with the most users is least likely to exit the business. Strictly speaking, that makes sense. And, the logic becomes self-validating as time goes on and additional consumers employ it. Economists have a name for this — they call it same-side network effects. Any given e-book platform is more valuable (in this case because it carries less risk) when additional users join it.

This can eventually lead to significant control over the market by a single company. Because of this, the current method of e-book DRM does not benefit the publishing industry. If current DRM practices continue, growth in the e-book market will likely lead to increased power among e-book distributors in the supply chain.

But for now, the K machine is finding eager buyers. Mark LaPedus has done a good job of pinpointing the reasons for  EE Times—via his quote of Jim Friedland, an analyst at Cowan and company:

”We believe that Amazon will continue to dominate the e-reader market because: (1) the company benefits from low customer acquisition costs by promoting the Kindle on the homepages of its 50-55 million active U.S. customers; (2) Amazon offers more titles, as well as newspaper and magazine subscriptions, which are not offered by Sony or Barnes & Noble; (3) Amazon enables users to download books wirelessly via the Sprint 3G network (Sony does not provide a wireless connection; Barnes & Noble is not launching a wireless-enabled device until next year); and (4) Amazon offers more extensive product-related content, including user/editorial reviews,” he added.

(Via KindleToday.)

Update by PB:  However this report by Forrester Research is not quite so positive. Sarah Rotman Epps says:

… the types of consumers likely to buy an eReader are changing. While early adopters of eReaders were a perfect storm of demographics for Amazon (they could afford the device, they have a need for the device in business travel and urban commuting, they like technology, and they buy lots of books online), future prospects for the devices look completely different. They’re more likely to be female, less tech optimistic, and they read a lot (on average, 5 books per month) but they buy and borrow books from multiple sources, as opposed to buying lots of books online.

The big takeaway is that this could spell trouble for Amazon, if competitors can move in to better serve the later waves of adopters who don’t have as strong a relationship with the eCommerce giant.

I’ve heard from clients that they’re already seeing this shift–more women buying the devices and shopping for eBooks. Looking forward to continuing the discussion…

Related: Why the Kindle 2 is a useless plastic slab for me—and many others with disabilities, by Robert Kingett, a visually impaired high school student in Florida.

But America Online and the Internet walloped Prodigy, although AOL needed to Net-tize itself to survive.

Industry-wide standards are good. How about the war between Betamax and VHS, where the latter won—to the benefit of consumers and Hollywood alike?

That’s why I’m rooting for Amazon to do ePub, as CEO Jeff Bezos kinda hinted it might. Now, in WSJ.com commentary republished in MarketWatch, Brett Arends is more or less saying the same thing. “What happens if you buy a lot of books on your Kindle and then decide to switch to a different e-book reader from another company using the rival ePub format?” Sony, Bookeen, BeBook, Astak—a slew companies are embracing ePub via Adobe Digital Editions.

“I think Amazon has overestimated their power in the value chain," Arends quotes the Gartner Group’s Allen Weiner, an e-book specialist. "I don’t think their proprietary format is going to have the ability to compete with ePub if that’s offered by everybody else."

Mind you, this isn’t nirvana yet. ePub needs to avoid DRM—which turns it into a proprietary format in effect (the situation with Adobe Digital Editions in regard to DRMed books).

Social DRM, the embedding of customer names and addresses in e-book files, could be a substitute if need be. Then ePub would truly be a standard, as opposed to the danger of yet another conflict between Adobe-DRMed ePub and, say, Amazon-DRMed ePub. Already B&N is on the way to DRM-wrap ePub for eReader.

But at least a DRMed standard format is better than a DRMed proprietary format, since the social DRM for best-sellers—or, better, no DRM—can always come later.  If Jeff Bezos is really smart, he’ll confound the devil out of his rivals at Adobe and open up store selling DRMless ePub, just as he commendably offers DRMless MP3s.

Speaking of ePub: I’d love to see the IDPF tell more how how it will handle the issue of cloud computing and deal with issues such as embedded fonts in that environment. First hand, via OpenReader, which I co-founded, I learned that the usual suspects, yes, the corporate “suits,” needed to be involved in standards development; and I remain supportive of the IDPF for that reason. But I remain grumpy about the IDPF’s pokiness in advancing the ePub standard, and I’m still grumpier about the miserliness of the book industry toward standards development via the group.

Related: Techmeme roundup.

Also of interest: The AP on legal free e-books to promote authors’ titles (via MobileRead). While the AP call this “the latest craze,” this is really old news—especially for series-related titles in the SF community.

The International Digital Publishing Forum is short of the resources it needs to keep up long term with Amazon’s Kindle team—or perhaps with Apple, if Steve Jobs and friends are about to hatch something.

Decent shared annotations, anyone? Or reliable interbook linking?

What’s more, the official ePub logo is months late, almost surely for want of resources. I’d advise the IDPF against its Scrooge-level miserliness. The more ePub lags in funding, the less leverage publishers enjoy against Amazon and perhaps Apple.

Blame Markus Dohle types if Kindle wins

If Amazon’s oh-so-locked-up Kindle does prevail, I’ll know whom to blame for not supplying the IDPF with the cash it needs to do the job. Random House. Simon and Schuster. Macmillan. Hachette.  Wiley. And Adobe and others.

But I’ll pick on Random in particular because of of the size of its parent, Bartelsmann, and because a guy with a production background is CEO. Come on, Markus Dohle. $250K a year for the IPDF isn’t gong to bankrupt you guys regardless of the book business’s depression. This is a drop of a drop of Random’s revenue and a fraction of your salary.

Just why, Markus, is the IDPF limping along with just one staffer, the dedicated but overworked Michael Smith, who, by the way, has nothing to do with this post? Shouldn’t the IDPF get a technical coordinator? It’s a standards group, too, not just a trade organization. But to go by the glacial pace of ePub development, you’d never know it.

The IDPF loves to think of itself as an organization of volunteers. But if it takes more paid people to do the job right, including consultants, so be it. Otherwise Amazon and Apple will have a built-in advantage. A little sense of urgency, please.

ePub Bandwagon rolling ahead for now—despite miserly publishers

Meanwhile, in spite of the uber-backwardness of Bertelsmann and others in publishing industry, more or less mired in the 19th century, the ePub bandwagon has kept rolling forward. More and more hardware vendors would rather not rely so heavily on the Amazon-owned Mobipocket format, for which Amazon won’t even permit a reader for the iPhone.

Striking back, the new Opus e-readers from Bookeen use ePub as a flagship format (the related Adobe software can handle PDF, too). Official ePub support for the BeBook is around the bend. And Sony is continuing its ePub support in the about-to-be-released PRS-300 and PRS-600 (see press release and Washington Post article, which, by the way, contains Rob Pegoraro’s usual wisdom on DRM and a quote from us on e-book pricing).

Of course, like the IDPF, Sony could do much better. When will it wake up and sell ePub-format bestsellers in its eBookStore, not just the proprietary BBeB? But I think that will come in time. A PC World article just the other day was calling for a standard e-book format even if it didn’t name names. Another example of the need for the IDPF to start branding its baby with the logo—-PRONTO!

On the ePub creation front…

Meanwhile things are progressing on the ePub creation front.

The Atlantis word-processor recently added ePub creation, even for people who aren’t HTML geniuses, and now a new ePub editor has come out in Alpha: Sigil.

Sigal is “free and open software under GPLv3” for Windows, Linux and the Mac; and  it offers such goodies as WYSIWYG and import TXT, HTML and existing ePub files. See post and forum on the MobileRead site. Meanwhile click on the image to the right for a more detailed view of an ePub book created with Sigil.

For latecomers: TeleRead helped bring ePub about. Jon Noring and I created a group to push the OpenReader standard, which in turn spurred the IDPF to do ePub to avoid being preempted. For years the IDPF had put standards on the back burner. The last thing we need is a repetition of the past apathy.