Troy Wolverton of the Silicon Valley Mercury News has a great column looking at the “Tower of e-Babel” problem of myriad incompatible e-book formats, and how Apple’s iBooks may be set to make it worse.
Until recently, Wolverton notes, everyone except Amazon was standardizing on EPUB, putting pressure on Amazon to come into line with them. However, since iBooks uses an entirely different form of DRM than the standard EPUB version, this means it will not be cross-compatible with the DRM everybody else uses.
Apple has already shown great ability to sell digital content such as music and movies, and there’s every reason to believe that it will become a big player in the e-books market as well. If it does, two of the industry’s biggest players will be offering e-books that are incompatible not only with each other’s readers, but with those of the rest of the business.
I would tend to agree (as I believe would most other TeleRead contributors). The multitude of confusing formats and apps may helping hold e-books back from wider adoption. Even I get confused sometimes, and I’ve been following e-books for over twelve years.
I really wouldn’t worry a bout iPad/iBook incompatibility. Ipad owners won’t be buying ebooks anyway, just newspapers, mags and comic books.
If you survey iPad owners in a year’s time, I’ll bet that they spend less than 10% of their time on the device reading BOOKS. So, if they aren’t reading books, they won’t buy them.
This may only be a problem if Apple locks out the ability to buy e-books from all sources other than iBooks, or to download them from your computer… and this has not yet been established to be the case. If customers can buy e-books from any source and load them onto the iPad, it won’t matter what iBooks uses, the customer can ignore them.
Just as the e-book (and computer) community made endless speculations about the iPad before it was presented, the communities are still making speculations before the device is actually out. Before we start panicking without evidence, let’s wait and see.
Um, last I checked, EPUB enabled DRM but didn’t set any standards for DRM; thus any criticism arising from Apple’s failure to implement “standard DRM” is false on the face of it and reflects the author’s misunderstanding of the issues.
The fact that some EPUB publishers are using ADEPT from Adobe (thankfully, because it’s so trivial to strip out) is irrelevant.
Since I loathe Adobe’s DRM-mangling Digital Editions, any alternative is a plus. If we must have DRM for a while, as we did with music, then let it be Apple’s FairPlay. Apple’s iBooks will, I suspect, be infinitely better than Adobe’s Digital Editions. It’s almost impossible to imagine something worse.
This Mercury News columnist apparently doesn’t layout books and publish them like I do, so he misses what is important. From the perspective of those creating ebooks, the DRM doesn’t matter. It’s a wrapper placed on books by distributors. ePub is ePub. Different wrappers create no hassle with differing formats for different platforms. Create an ePub book for the Kindle, and you’ve created one for the iPad, even if the DRM is different.
With Apple standardizing on ePub, we can now move on to what really matters, creating ebooks that are worth reading.
Right now, all the major reformatable ebooks formats are woefully weak. They can handle novels, but not anything that’s much more complicated than a word-after-word structure. We need an enhanced ePub that can handle layouts as complex as PDF can handle (smartly placing graphics and linking to notes and cross-references). We also need InDesign-like applications for ePub that insulate those who edit and layout ebooks from all the complexities of XHTL. Editors shouldn’t have to be geeks.
Effectively, if the iPad lets me buy from anywhere, & read using whatever app I need on the iPhone, a large part of the DRM barrier disappears.
If I find out that my iPad locks out other reader apps, I’ll have to think about returning it.
Perhaps it might be time for something like OpenEpub a non-DRM copy-cat version, with perhaps some extras.
I really had great hopes for Epub but the DRM issue is destroying the industry.
As for the extras:
TEI support.
A system of internal “paragraph” based reference IDs.
A single free system of Unique Ids for ebook editions. (In my view ISBNs can never work for the likely flourishing of thousands of new publishers every year).
A simple system of identifying XML tags with logical structures (ie “body paragraphs”, “Footnotes”) so CSS and user adjustments can go hand in hand.