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By David Rothman

image As an e-book-lover rooting for all kinds of hardware options to succeed—from Kindles and Sony Readers to cellphone software—I can’t resist calling attention to two posts on the Reading 2.0 email list.

The first, from Adobe’s Nick Bogaty, mentions the need to streamline the production process for publishers interested in a multi-device approach.

The other, from Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, one of the world’s most respected publishers of technical books, tells why proprietary formats fail in time. Elsewhere, Tim zeros in on one peril of a Kindle-centric approach. The present Kindle format is a disaster for computer publishers wanting to reproduce code. Do we really want Amazon to set technical standards for publishers of any kind?

Streamlining publishers’ production processes—to grow the number of e-books

Nick is hardly disinterested on format matters, and in fact, I’ve often disagreed with him on various issues over the years. But his comments in this case rang oh so true. “If Kindle supported ePub natively,” he wrote, “then publishers producing ePub files with their vendors or via authoring tools like InDesign would know off the bat how their files look on a variety of devices that have ePub support…”

Exactly! Why the devil should publishers and others have to worry about supporting so many individual formats for various devices? The less work it is to get a book out in E, the more e-books we’ll see. Amazon’s 150,000-title Kindle inventory is still pathetic compared to the total number of books for the past and present. Each year the publishing world churns out hundreds of thousands of titles—at least 300,000. Mind you, the 150,000 titles for the Kindle includes blogs, magazines and newspapers, not just books.

Yes, some people are challenging the assertion from Adobe e-booker Bill McCoy that the selection of commercially significant titles at the Kindle Store is less than at airport bookstores. Whether he’s right or wrong, however, that’s just a small detail. My main point is that Amazon’s format-centric approach is a threat to diversity.

I want to read books, period—not Kindle-only titles. Or, I should add, not just Adobe-DRMed ePub titles.

The true solution remains ePub without DRM, as I see it, or with social DRM or watermarking. With such arrangements, interoperability problems would fade away or at least be less of a challenge. Laudably, Bill has talked up social DRM in at least one post, reflecting his personal opinions, and I hope his company follows through.

Kindle Store as a disaster zone for computer book publishers who want to repro code

Meanwhile, in responding to Nick’s message, Tim O’Reilly offers a major reason why his company hasn’t fully embraced the Kindle:

“We went down that path in the 80s, with dozens of vendors demanding our X books for their incompatible online documentation reader applications. We saw what a hell that was for publishers, and instead pursued an SGML solution, which led us to Viola and the WWW, and sparked our early advocacy for the WWW platform. These choices have consequences. Proprietary file formats do one of two things:

“1. Fail
“2. Dominate, and lead to monopolies.
“There’s not much in between. Proprietary file formats don’t co-exist well.”
Exactly. And when you’re stuck with one, it just might not serve your future needs. For example, in another message, Tim wrote: “We’ve taken some heat from readers who want our books on Kindle, but we’re holding the line because Kindle doesn’t support the mono-spaced fonts that are required to give a good experience when reading program source code. We’ve put some narrative titles on computer culture and so forth on kindle, but are waiting for them to fix this oversight before experimenting more broadly. We really want our readers to have a good experience.”
Of course, even if Amazon fixes this particular shortcoming, others will emerge. The true solution, as always, remains genuinely nonproprietary e-book standards without DRM to muck things up.
 
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