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Why we need an ePub logo—pronto!
August 2, 2009 | 4:00 am
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By Evan Leibovitch
Welcome to Evan Leibovitch, our latest contributor! Evan works at York University in Toronto and has written dozens of articles on open source issues. A longer bio appears at the end of this post. – D.R.
During the workshop that preceded the IDPF conference a few months ago, someone mentioned they’d heard that Amazon or another company was working on Yet Another Format that wasn’t quite complaint with ePub. This rumored format, we were told, might be called “ePub plus” or something like that.
Whether the comment was a genuine notice of impending threat, a trial balloon or simply an innocent “what if,” the effect was chilling. Geeks in the audience easily recognized the tactic of spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) to try to destabilize confidence in competitors.
The best way to tackle FUD is head-on. In this context, ePub’s creators need to protect what "ePub" means, promoting the name as a real brand, and not allowing it to be mutated or redefined by those who stand to lose from having a level playing field. It means logos and it means trademarks, done simply and quickly. Michael Smith, IDPF’s executive director, told me that an ePub logo contest is coming Real Soon Now. As far as this keyboard’s concerned, it can’t happen soon enough.
I hope the IDPF jury choosing the logo sticks to some basic objectives. The winning design must:
- Be icon-like—simple, distinct, and easily recognizable.
- Help indicate to consumers how to match file and reader.
- Allow an easy way to indicate enhancements.
They keys are recognition and simplicity. This means not having a whole bunch of mutated variations of the logo for DRM, DRM-free, color, "friendly to speech synthesizers" or whatever feature doodads the format can optionally offer now and in the future.
The logo judges ought to study the approach taken elsewhere in the consumer electronics industry, where it’s not uncommon for consortia to get together to enforce standards and the brands associated with them. A particularly relevant example is the DVD logo—simple, single, monochrome and easily identifiable. Added features (as required) are added underneath to the core logo . Even the ill-fated DVD-HD format used a logo that added onto, but did not change, the core DVD identifier.
As far as I can see, many good candidates for an ePub logo already exist. My personal favorite is the one-color, two dimensional graphic at ThreePress—remember, it’s about simplicity and distinctiveness, and this one is is a good mix of simplicity and recognizable book icon. And while I’m as anti-DRM as you’ll find—I came to e-books from the world of open source software—the “DRM FreePub” logos at ThreePress are needlessly complex and too clever by half.
(And let’s not forget that most of the disinterested mainstream doesn’t even know what “DRM” means, so let’s not be in such a rush to embed the term in logos. Leave it to the DRM implementers to define it as “protected” or “encrypted” or whatever sugar coating they like—but that shouldn’t be the headache of the logo maker.)
In any case, it’’s important not to get too caught up in one particular choice—in matters like this personal taste plays a major role, and I’ve seen tech start-ups almost end before they began because the founders couldn’t agree on a logo. I just want IDPF’s logo jury to agree on one with relative speed and then run with it.
Run, that is, right to the trademark office, for both the graphic logo and the word "ePub" (or "ePUB", if we want to stay consistent with the Threepress logo). While I’m told by Teleread Co-editor Paul Biba that the process has cleaned up considerably, my own trademarking experiences with the USPTO were five-year nightmares; ultimately successful but exhausting. And doing the U.S. isn’t enough, there’s no Berne treaty on trademarks. The marks need to be registered at least in the European Union, Canada, China (where the readers are made) and probably elsewhere.
At this point many readers would be thinking “all those trademark applications— it’s feed-the-lawyer time”… and those readers would be correct. But the IDPF can easily balance the cost of this by charging a nominal licensing fee for use of the logo. There are a number of possible financial models, depending on whether the IDPF sees logo control as a matter of mere stewardship, or a recurring revenue source to fund vendor-neutral ePub promotion.
Either way, having ePub and the logo as trademarks helps protect the standard. After all, since the standard itself is open, controlling ePub as a brand is the only available tactic to ensure that users of the name also respect the file format standard. Existing ePub implementers can’t stop others from creating their own file format mutation but IDPF can (and must) require that it can’t be called “ePub” or even “ePub-based.” And that means no “ePub Plus,” real or imagined, a requirement good for everyone except those ignoring the standard or trying to compete against it.
Only when the trademarks are done, and the IDPF owns and polices what can be called "ePub", can we be assured that the ePub standard will be reasonably safe from FUD attacks. When that happens, we eliminate one major impediment to mainstream acceptance.
More on Evan:
"My postgrad degree is journalism and I’ve done a good bit of writing… I have a very deep tech background, specifically in the area of open source and open standards. Thanks to my current job at York University in Toronto, I’m involved with producing academic research in ePub format…
“I wrote more than 100 columns for ZDNet at the turn of the century on open source issues—some are still searchable.
"Lately my work has been attracting attention in Canada because of the hunger here for progress in e-books, in a country without Kindles. This has resulted in some attention—I also led a session recently at BookCamp Toronto called ‘Kindle, Shmindle: The future of e-books in Canada.’
“I have a keen interest in open source methods for building e-books, creating an entire publishing workflow using only free tools. As you can imagine, I’m heavily anti-DRM and well versed on Creative Commons and community development techniques. I’d also like to participate on the movement of e-books into academia, one of the more enticing—yet evasive—markets for publishers.”
About the CC-licensed image: It’s from PSD.
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Comments:
Asking anyone involved in open source to adjudicate graphic design seems like almost the worst imaginable scenario. I thought you wanted results.
Hi, Joe. Thanks for your comment, but remember, it’s the IDPF people who’ll judge the actual contest or appoint those who do. What’s more, it isn’t as if all open source efforts are design disasters. David
Logos are fine but a full standards-compliance test suite with actual teeth is needed to enforce what an ePub is to be and, most important, how a reader app is to render that file. The emphasis being on “teeth”.
Failure to do so will allow a specific ePub “supporter” to hijack the spec by putting alternate renders and creation tools at a disadvantage, much as Netscape did with HTML during the early days of the web. At that time it really didn’t matter what the HTML spec was; HTML was, by default, whatever Netscape rendered.
This cannot be allowed to happen to ePub.
Yet it is well on its way…
My specific concern about enforcement is that in the industry’s rush to adopt ePub as a holy grail, it has unleashed a flood of reader and creator apps, each implementing *their* specific interpretation and coding/formating style expecting it to be accomodated on the other end.
Classic corporate “flip-it-over-the-wall” thinking.
And, in the process, they have unleashed hundreds of thousands of ebook files that are pretty much guaranteed *not* to offer a uniform user experience in features or capabilities across the spectrum of reader apps and devices.
Will market share decide which interpretation of the spec prevails or will somebody actually have the guts and power to bell the cat and *force* providers to supply standards-compliant product?
I suspect the answer is no. The mice will talk a lot but the cat will go un-belled.
As a matter of law, it would be easy for the IDPF to enforce compliance with an EPUB standard. If the phrase “EPUB” is trademarked, as I hope it is, and if the new logo is trademarked, then the IDPF could license only those users who met certain standards to use “EPUB” or the logo.
The way it works is that if you want to use the trademarks you have to sign a license agreement that includes specific standards that you have to meet. If you don’t meet them then the IDPF could pull the marks. This is a very common way for companies to ensure that others who use their marks comply with their quality standards.
Anyone else could be sued for trademark infringement or failure to comply with the license agreement. Part of the suit would be to get an injunction to prevent them from using either trademark.
Unfortunately, the IDPF really consists of one guy and a bunch of part timers and so I doubt they would have the resources to do any of the above. It would take manpower to set the standards and to constantly review all the works out there that were using the licensed logo – so I really don’t expect anything much will come of this.
But the important point is that it is eminently doable, and even commonplace.
Paul Biba:
Unfortunately, the IDPF really consists of one guy and a bunch of part timers and so I doubt they would have the resources to do any of the above. It would take manpower to set the standards and to constantly review all the works out there that were using the licensed logo – so I really don’t expect anything much will come of this.
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We are in agreement.
That s what I meant about “teeth”.
CDs and DVD has a Logo program. And they have trademarks. But what matters is that if somebody comes out with an incompatible mutation (and it *has* happened–the music studios have tried for years to create unrippable CDs that would not play on PCs) they have to deal with the Lawyers from Sony and Philips and the very deep-pocketed licensing body.
They have the will and the means t inflict serious pain on transgressors.
With ePub the danger isn’t a hypothetical ePub-plus (Google search never heard of it before this article) embrace-and-extend attack from the outside but rather the buggaboo of committee standards: interpretation. And the ability of a savvy, unscrupulous “supporter” to hijack the standard by creating a defacto “interpretation standard” based on availability and market share not on official standards. In fact, given the inevitable gaps in any committe-based standard, they can cite full spec-compliance while at the same time advancing their own flavor at the expense of interoperability.
This is not paranoia; this is happening right now all over in the IT industry. Everybody preaches interoperability. On *their* terms. Examples abound all over because nobody has the absolute power to say what the standard means. Words are cheap. Deeds cost money. And in the marketplace paper specs are just a marketting gimmick; what matters is the implementation with the market share.
Standards hijacking is common.
And very very profitable.
And it is happening to ePub right now. Just look at the changelogs of Calibre and other ePub tools.
“Tweaked XXX to be compatible with yyy.”
Without an enforcer with teeth, talk of Logo programs and trademark suits are just that.
Talk.
To Felix and Paul:
This is indeed the point at which push comes to shove. Now that they’ve worked so hard on having a standard, what are IDPF members prepared to do to protect and promote that standard?
Count me in on full agreement that an unenforced standard is no standard at all. The question, of course is, what next with ePub?
It is reasonable for IDPF to go to its deeper-pocketed members — especially those in the chain directly competing with Amazon — to establish a fund to pay for the setup and policing of the trademarks. If handled properly, such a fund could be self-sustaining through nominal licensing fees. Eventually the fund could be paid back to its original backers.
In any case, I note that there are many who feel that the ePub standard is insufficient for its needs, and they may be right. But that’s not a reason to impede protecting what already exists. Most who has used USB or Blu-ray knows that those “standards” have gone through multiple versions, without eroding public use or respect for those formats and protocols.
And as for Joe’s unfortunate admission of ignorance… that’s more deserving of pity than ridicule.