eBabel in various forms has come under attack in USA Today and the Washington Post.
In Incompatibilities confuse consumers in the former newspaper, Michelle Kessler wrote of clashing electronic formats in the areas of video games, digital music, next-generation DVD, Ultra Wideband, DRM, storage cards, and digital video. Not mentioning e-bookdom but very much describing the embarrassing format debacle there, she said in Friday’s issue:
Turf battles–not inadequate technology–cause most compatibility problems. Competing technologies often emerge because electronics makers can’t agree. That confuses consumers, and causes them to spend money on products that become worthless because they won’t work together. Manufacturers pay a toll in wasted resources on redundant work. An intractable compatibility problem can stall thegrowth of a promising technology.
Isn’t it interesting that Ms. Kessler was confident enough of the damage from eBabel to write the above even in a news article? I’d have done the same. A fact’s a fact. Protracted format wars cost most everyone dearly in the end.
Meanwhile in Waiting for a TV Technology to Inherit the Future in today’s Washington Post, tech columnist Rob Pegoraro said:
Every time the electronics business has given birth to a new type of product, from DVD players to cordless phones, it has eventually become a cheap, commodity item with tiny profit margins. Few people in the business relish that conclusion, but it must happen if the product will find a home in the mass market.
Unless, that is, the industry gets stuck in a senseless format war that scares away customers. Remember VHS vs. Beta? That same miserable experience is getting a replay this year as two camps of companies ready successors to the DVD.
On one side, a wide range of manufacturers, including Sony, Panasonic, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Philips, and a few major studios back a format called Blu-Ray. On the other, a wide range of movie studios and a few smaller manufacturers (Toshiba, RCA and others) support one called HD DVD.
Yes, margins may decline as formats standards eventually come–and they will–but the volume will be much bigger as the media and consumers discover the new ease of use. What’s more, it will be easier for different kinds of products to talk to each other, increasing the usability of each.
Shouldn’t the e-book business learn from the dislike that the media and consumers in general have for format clashes in most any form? Adding to the debacle within e-bookdom is that the Open eBook Forum was announced back in 1998 as a way to avoid a VHS -vs.-Beta kind of mess. Combine format wars with inept DRM and it’s no wonder that e-books still have a bad rep and sales are far short of original expectations. While some eBabel may be unavoidable when technologies are new and different formats are still proving themselves, it isn’t as if e-books were invented yesterday. OpenReader, anyone?
Related: N.Y. Times on Tower of eBabel.
(Thanks to Rochelle for the pointer to the USA Today article.)
