“The important thing, from my point of view, is that we don’t repeat a Beta vs. VHS disaster. In the VCR field, consumers delayed their choices. Ultimately, if they wanted to watch movies or tape shows, they had to pick one format or the other. With e-books, if there are 6, 7, 8, 10 incompatible, narrow, non-interoperable, competing standards, the public doesn’t have to choose any of them. They can simply go with what’s worked for the last 1,300 years: paper books. In this particular arena, it may not be that we duke it out and the winner survives. If a standards war breaks out, the loser could be everybody. Without standards, we may not have an e-book industry.” – Dick Brass, Microsoft VP for technology development, as quoted in Wired News on Oct. 8, 1998.
The TeleRead take: Four years later the public still must struggle with a bunch of competing standards. This Thanksgiving week, we are grateful to the deities at Microsoft for getting the Open eBook movement started within the little world of e-books, but at the same time we’re dismayed that today’s standards exist only as a file conversation format for publishers and the like. Hey, Open eBookers, finish the job.
Exactly who’s to blame for the industry-crippling delay? No finger-pointing here. Whatever the facts, however, Joe or Jane E-Book User still must choose formats or at least struggle with more than one on the same machine.
Oh, and then there are all the protection-related obstacles that still exist for libraries wanting to circulate copyrighted e-books in different formats. It will be interesting to see if the recently announced Digital Library Reserve system from Overdrive, an Open eBook Forum sponsor, can truly help or will in the future.
Let’s hope that some progress on the standards question is made Dec. 5 at the TabletPC Publishing Conference presented by Open eBook. Don’t count on this, however. In fact, some participants at the conference seems more interested in promoting the proprietary formats for reading newspapers on Tablet PCs.
And here the people in the e-publishing biz wonders why they aren’t more successful? Time to cut out the hype and deliver some true industrywide standards. Yes, as Dorothea Salo has noted, there are complexities–for example, handling not just text but also graphics. But with enough coordinated effort, these could be overcome.
Meanwhile one hopes that hardware vendors, even those of dedicated machines for e-books, will allow their products to read ASCII and HTML–unlike the greedsters at Gemstar, who are trying to fence in their users. The affordable Linux tablet expected from Lindows.com could be a terrific alternative for uppity folks who hate the proprietary approach.
