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eBabel on and on

29.05.08 Tom Tivnan

Perhaps you were one of the keen early adopters who rushed out to Borders earlier this month to plunk down £399 on iRex's iLiad, the first dedicated e-book reader launched in the UK.

If you were able to speed-read through the 50 pre-loaded classics, you would undoubtedly have wanted more e-books. So where did you go next for your downloads? Well, it certainly was not to Borders.co.uk—the much-hyped, much-anticipated new site was still not up and running by the time The Bookseller went to press. You might have then thought of the world's biggest e-tailer Amazon, only to discover its UK site has no e-books on offer and that its US site sells them in a format that can only be played on the Kindle, its own e-reader.

If you moved on to other download sites, the choices would have become more complex and bewildering. EBooks.com, one of iRex's recommended retailers, sells most books in Mobipocket and Adobe .pdf formats, both of which can be read by the iLiad. But it also offers titles in Microsoft Reader, which iLiad does not support and a non-techie customer might easily download by mistake. Looking further afield, the choices, and potential stumbling blocks for the consumer, increase; fictionwise.com, for example, sells some of its titles in up to 12 different formats.

Given the number of e-readers that may soon be on the market and the confusing multiplicity of formats, it is no wonder the market has been dubbed the "Tower of eBabel" by e-book campaigners.

Tipping point

With the launch of the iLiad and the widely tipped release of the Sony Reader and Kindle in the UK within the next year, resolving the format issue is becoming crucial for trade publishers. In April, the Publishers Association c.e.o. Simon Juden used his speech at the group's a.g.m. to call on the industry to reach a standard for e-books, saying that the Kindle and the Sony Reader not being able to talk to each other was not beneficial to "the customer, the content provider or the publisher."

His views were echoed at this month's BA conference by Ian Hudson, Random House UK deputy c.e.o. and PA president, who said publishers and retailers need to achieve "interoperability"—the ability to switch back and forth between devices—and find one common e-book format.

Some in the industry have responded, with Penguin, Random House Group, HarperCollins and Pan Macmillan adopting the .epub format, a standard that is being pushed by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), the industry's digital trade standards organisation. Epub is an XML-based file, which allows publishers to relatively easily convert a number of differing formats and wrap with anti-piracy Digital Rights Management (DRM) programming. The number of UK publishers coming on board is perhaps not unrelated to the imminent UK launch of Sony's next- generation device, which is believed to be able to read .epub using Adobe's Digital Edition software. Sony, however, will not confirm which formats the new reader will support.

A battle of the formats could begin when Amazon's Kindle hits Britain. Its bespoke .azw format cannot be read on the Sony Reader and Sony's cannot be read on Kindle. Epub can be converted to Amazon's format and vice-versa, but not "natively", within devices. Publishers will have a multiplicity of formats available. Conversion costs are not astronomical, at least for big publishers—currently about £300 for the first switch from an initial file to .epub, then on a book by book basis after that.

However, the number of formats clouds the route of content to customer, putting the onus on the user. Customers who mistakenly download the wrong format may have to convert those e-books on their own computers. For the tech-savvy early adopters who largely make up the e-book audience thus far, this perhaps is not a problem. As the e-book becomes more prevalent, however, customer confusion, and frustration, is sure to increase.

This has caused publisher concern. "What we need to avoid for the customer," says Jeremy Ettinghausen, Penguin's digital publishing director. "is a whole Betamax/VHS scenario. One of the failures thus far with e-books is the publishers have been presenting a multiplicity of formats. We feel that if publishers and retailers get behind one single standard we can present the offer to customers much more clearly."

Some believe the relative ease of format conversion has the chance to smooth over any kind of format war. Fionnuala Duggan, digital director at Random House Group, says: "It's a different scenario than Betamax v VHS or differing music formats. Even if you do download these files into different devices they can be reformatted; it's not like you are downloading into a dead-end piece of hardware."

It's the DRM, stupid

Yet while .epub offers solutions, it is not perfect. Some publishers have complained that it lacks a web element, is not browser-friendly, search-engine-friendly, or at all ready for the next wave of web-based social utilities.

Achieving pure interoperablity is also not just strictly about format. Even within format, different publishers' DRM can vary, affecting device readability. Files wrapped with DRM also contain a variety of restrictions, such as whether a customer can print or not, if the file can download to other devices, or whether it can be emailed.

Even within formats, DRM continues to evolve. As Martyn Daniels, vice-president of sales and marketing at digital content management specialist Value Chain International, explains: "Mobipocket, for example, has gone though several incarnations. If you are using, say, a Mobi 3.0 file and the device you are using reads Mobi 6.0, it will still be able to read it, but there will be subtle differences that affect performance."

David Rothman, an American writer who runs the e-book blog Teleread.org, believes that DRM is anti-consumer and is relatively in-effective against piracy. He says: "DRM penalises legitimate owners with various restrictions, such as limits on the number of devices. If a book is truly popular and big money is at stake, then both amateur and professional pirates can scan paper copies, or even type them out, as happened with Harry Potter."

Rothman has called for publishers to agree to "social DRM"—an idea mooted by Bill McCoy, the general manager of Adobe's ePublishing business—no technical restrictions other than stamping a file with "This e-book is the property of . . ." Social DRM, Rothman believes, would open up the e-book market, and prohibit one dominant player such as Amazon from elbowing others out. He says: "The real irony with Amazon is that they have been doing wonderful things with music MP3s and anti-DRM on music downloads. The damaging thing is that Amazon is using DRM to herd customers into the Kindle away from other devices. This is not good news for publishers."

Most publishers have thus far been leery about committing to non-DRM. However, at this year's London Book Fair, Pan Mac digital director Sara Lloyd, while stressing she was expressing a personal view, argued that e-books without DRM would boost the e-book market.

The 8-track moment?

The recent rush of trade publishers to jump on the e-book reader bandwagon should not disguise the fact that it is but a fraction of the market. The bulk of the digital business these days is being done in the academic and STM arena. RHG's Duggan says: "If you look at the STM sector, sometimes up to 50% of their sales are in digital. On the trade side, we are nowhere near that yet."

In the academic market, most content is hosted on publisher online platforms and in university libraries, accessed by students on PCs and Macs. DRM and formatting issues are largely not a concern, either dealt with by the content provider online or read natively on the computers.

This raises issues of whether there will ever be an iPod moment for e-book readers, particularly since laptops are getting smaller, lighter and more affordable. Why buy an iLiad, Sony Reader or Kindle, with their restrictions, when you can buy a laptop for nearly the same price free of  the formatting hassles? Similarly, with the increased use of PDAs and Blackberrys and quick technological improvements in mobile phone technology, which again largely bypass format issues, will the iPod moment for e-readers actually be the iPod?

"Customers might want to ask themselves, 'do I want to spend that kind of money on a device that might be obsolete in a year's time?'" says Daniels. "If you got your fingers burnt on 8-tracks or CD-ROMs, you might not be so sure."

 

A glossary of formats

.epub Pushed by the International Digital Publishing Forum, the digital publishing trade body, the XML-based .epub's main strengths are its easy conversion for use on a variety of devices and its ability to "reflow" —to resize according to a device's screen size. Penguin, HarperCollins and Random House are among the trade publishers who have recently signed on. The Sony Reader is widely tipped to be .epub-compatible when it launches in the UK later this year.

Mobipocket (.mobi) Founded in 2000, Mobipocket has become the leading format for mobile devices such as PDAs and Blackberry. The company was snapped up by Amazon in 2005.

Kindle (.azw) The Kindle format is essentially a slightly modified Mobipocket wrapped with proprietary DRM and is the only format that can be downloaded from Amazon. Mobi DRM-free files can be read on the device.

BBeB Sony's DRM-encrypted proprietary format for its Sony Reader.

Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) Common on the web because of its ability to be read by a number of different computer types. Pdfs are less effective for e-book readers because they are designed to show standard paper sizes and thus cannot reflow to different screen sizes. Two .pdf formats —one for Acrobat Reader
and one for Adobe eReader, have led to confusion.

Microsoft Reader (.lit) Only readable on the proprietary Microsoft Reader programme (Windows only), installed on most Pocket PC handheld devices. An add-on, Convert LIT, allows you to change files to an .epub format.

eReader (.pbd) Designed mainly for handheld devices such as the Palm and Pocket PC, can also be used on any Windows or Macintosh operating systems. Does not support Blackberry or iPhones.

The Devices

Launched

iRex iLiad Holland-based firm launched the first e-reader in the UK this month, sold exclusively in Borders. Uses Linux operating systems which allows third-party development. Supports wi-fi.
Formats: XHTML, .pdfs, Mobipocket.
Retail price: £399

On launchpad            

Sony Reader Launched in the US in 2006 and a 2.0 version is widely tipped to be released in the UK later this year. Titles can be purchased from Sony's Connect website which has about 40,000 titles. Can play MP3 files.
Formats: BBeB Book, Adobe pdf, Jpegs, can support Microsoft Word with conversion.
Retail price: $299

Amazon Kindle Released last November in the US to much fanfare. Features include wireless connectivity which enables downloads direct to the Kindle without a computer. Currently about 125,000 Kindle titles available from Amazon.com. UK launch TBA.
Formats: Kindle (.azw), can also read non-DRM Mobipocket files.
Retail price: $399

Two to watch

Cybook Gen 3 French firm Bokeen's device launched in the US and France in October 2007. Stores up to 1,000 books and the company promises a 100-day battery life for the casual reader.
Formats: Mobipocket, PalmDoc, HTML, .txt, .pdf.
Retail price: $350

Redius Polymer Vision Spin-off of Dutch electronics giant Philips says it will launch its mobile phone/e-book reader in the UK later this year. The device, the size of a normal mobile phone, has a five-inch "rollable screen".
Formats: TBA. Retail: TBA

Flagship Feature tom tivnan Sony Kindle digitisation iLiad

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