@Pond: You are spot on about Amazon. The problem with most of the other publishers is that they believe they might be in Amazon’s position one day. Why compete fairly now when it means throwing away the ability to eliminate a fair field in the future?

Without getting too political, it’s the same reason most American’s will always vote against their own economic self-interest: they don’t wish to envision a future where being on top means you still have to work.

@Monica: ePub is HTML (and XML, for both content and meta-data) inside of a zip file. Really, that’s all! I have often created my own ePub files by hand starting with an HTML file. The only files you may not recognize if you unzip a .epub are a couple of XML documents that tell the reader what files it should look for and in what order it should show them.

It is true that the IDPF actually specifies a subset of the (X)HTML standard, but that’s not something people really need to concern themselves with.

@Starbookzz: As David points out, software support is arriving and at a quick rate for something like this. Most of the reading platforms are, unfortunately, closed, but Stanza and FBReader support should work influence on the existing e- market.

I would take a stab and state that the complexity of HTML/CSS rendering is the biggest hurdle, but as mobile platforms get more powerful they’ll be more capable of adopting rendering libraries into the reader software. (That is, if the authors can get past wanting to write all of their own software.)

There is also a chicken-and-egg problem with content and readers. Toward that end, I think Kovid Goyal’s Calibre (which is honestly the best way to convert your existing library for a Stanza/ePub reader) has done more for ePub support than anything else in the past year.

P: Totally agree with you that the IDPF could be doing MUCH more. Tough-love is indeed very much called for.

M: I’m pushing ePub BECAUSE it’s come a long way—even without the IDPF doing more. Major publishers are using it as a production format, and Sony is using it as a consumer format. We won’t be better off if Amazon wins and one company controls e-book formats. As for HTML, it’s not as sophisticated typographically as ePub.

S.: Um, you don’t know about Stanza–the iPhone e-reading software that has more than a million copies downloaded? ePpub is the main format for Stanza. The similar iPod Touch isn’t a PDA but in many ways comes close. I love reading Stanza book on my Touch. More ePub-capable readers are on the way, including the rival Plastic Logic machine, which has a bigger screen than the Kindle and is much more rugged.

Thanks,
David

Why not simple HTML/XML inside of a zip file?

The ones that should be pushing epub are as you say, the group that created it. They should be pushing templates for MSFt-Word and OpenOffice.org that support seamless exporting to epub standards. That group seems hopeless to me. They’re like the engineers who toil over the dtd, but won’t consider writers or readers. Without whom their cause is lost.

Another group that should be looking into epub are Amazon’s rivals. Yeah, I mean Borders and (especially) Barnes & Noble. These two chains, and others like them, should team up and push their own digital stores with epub books. The way you beat the industry leader is not with another proprietary approach, but with open standards.

For the past year, epub has had a chance to develop reading/browsing agents for every platform under the sun, and really push the format for writers and publishers as well as readers. They could have stolen a few marches on Amazon, whose format was limited to the one device. Did they? They did not.

Now if Amazon carries through with multi-platform Kindle-reading software, that advantage will have been lost.

Meanwhile, I wish Sony would get on the ball and start using ePub more at its own eBook Store. And start *labeling* which eBooks are BBeB and which are ePub.