Sony planning to make its BBeB format an 'open' standard?

Up to now conventional wisdom has viewed Sony’s BBeB ebook format (used in its e-book reader) as proprietary. However, it looks like Sony is working to get their BBeB format, or at least the source format called “Xylog XML,” “blessed” as an international “open” standard by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). The forecast publication date is May 2007, IEC 62448.

The ramifications of such a standardization to the e-book industry are substantial as will be made apparent. But not enough information is publicly available to make any accurate assessment, so some of this is speculation. I hope others who do know more will step forward and comment on this article, especially whether my conclusions are anywhere in the ballpark.

It is more than annoying that the IEC technical committee documents are password protected — so much for “open” standards. One laudable thing about IDPF is that they have made their standards work much more transparent to the public.

I first noticed mention of this standards effort in a fairly obscure Mobileread forum reference dating from September of last year. At the time, I had planned to write a blog article about that reference, but then my focus got diverted in other directions. However, I have not forgotten… just a few months late.

First, let’s start off with the home page of the IEC Technical Committee overseeing the e-book standards work. It doesn’t say much, and all the links to the good stuff appear to be password protected.

Fortunately, the poster of the Mobileread comment included a link to what appears to be the first or early draft proposal.

I also recall when I researched this back in early October that I was able to assemble a list of most of the technical committee participants. Based on my memory alone (I can’t find my notes), this list included Sony, Philips, Toshiba, Samsung, etc. — a “who’s who” list of the consumer hardware industry. Notably missing from the list were publishers, conversion houses, IDPF reps, and experts knowledgeable with XML-based publishing of books and documents.

In addition, I received some info today indicating that the format is quite incompatible with the IDPF OEBPS specification, making it very difficult to take OEBPS (as well as OpenReader, which is similar), and convert it to this candidate IEC format. (This is also pretty clear looking at the proposed draft linked above.)

To summarily conclude, it appears Sony, et al, have developed their own e-book standard which was developed with little or no input by publishers, document XML experts, and certainly not by IDPF reps, and are seeking to get their standard “blessed” by the IEC. The conversion of OEBPS into this IEC standard is difficult meaning, practically-speaking, that publishers can’t leverage their OEBPS production workflows to produce this new format, and vice versa.

Truly a Tower of eBabel, and the losers are both publishers and consumers.