How many readers love the Tower of eBabel? Raise your hands, virtually at least. Thought so. Perhaps some format jockeys thrive on this confusion, but the typical reader of e-books hates the mess.
So I’m glad to see Dear Author taking on the eBabel issue, again, just as the Jon Noring and the TeleBlog and others have done for years
Movie biz moving forward on standards
DA’s Jane, source of the cat image, notes the $200 cost of wrapping up a book with Sony’s DRM-infested format for its e-store. Multiply that for half a dozen other major formats, and you can see the harm done to book publishing. Non-DRMed formats would be cheaper, and, yes, $200 probably isn’t the exact figure for other formats; but the costs still add up, especially with large publishers digitizing thousands of titles for their back lists. The movie industry, as shown by the movement toward Blu Ray, is in some ways ahead of the book business. Then again the IDPF‘s .epub format, unlike BluRay, is nonproprietary. I just want to see it implemented.
Leadership from Hachette
Hachette has simplified things by using the.epub format as the sole distribution one. Is it any coincidence that I heard Hachette is publishing all new titles as e-books? Figures. The less eBabel, the easier it is for publishers to do E in a comprehensive way.
One way to popularize the .epub standard at the consumer level would be for the IPDF to do an Intel Inside-style logo that would appear first for nonDRMed books and then, in another color, include all .epub books—if/when the organization come up with interoperable DRM. Readers, as I can safely extrapolate from comments in Dear Author, would love the additional simplicity.
Meanwhile, with or without DRM, eBabel is costing the industry a pretty penny.
Technorati Tags: IDPF,International Digital Publishing Forum,epub
I have reached the conclusion that ebabel is less of a problem than DRM. Give us 1,000 different formats, but leave out the DRM and offer translating tools so we can take one format and transform it into a format we can read on whatever device we happen to have. Or into a format we prefer.
DRM and its attendant laws (such as DMCA) will end up destroying our culture. A hundred years from now no one will be able to read the current DRM files. But manuscripts from 700 years ago will still be readable…
To say that “Non-DRMed formats would be cheaper” is inaccurate. The use of, or inclusion of, DRM in a format does not have an absolute impact on the cost to produce it. It could be argued that if DRM were not a current reality of ebook consumption that there would be fewer proprietary ebook systems and therefore overall digital product production costs would be less, but I did not take that as your theme.
It is also inaccurate to assume the production costs to a number of formats is simply 2x, 3x, and so on. With the use of XML (including epub), publishers can design workflows that are based on an intermediate markup-based format and create derivative formats at a reduced cost using XML transformation technology.
Hi, Tyler. Really appreciated your weighing in with the pro-DRM side. It’s important for all participants on this debate to learn from each other. The TeleBlog is very open to you if you want to publish a full-length defense of DRM (memo to self: I need to follow up with a note to a DRM defender I met at Tools of Change).
That said, keep in mind one of the main problems of DRM—not just the costs, whatever they might be, but the confusion it creates among consumers, not to mention the difficulties of running the same files on a number of machines. Changes in hardware and software seem to be constants. That’s why DRM seems forever doomed to be much less than transparent.
But back to costs. If nothing else, publishers and distriubutors must worry about fees for use of the technology.
And as for Sony in particular, is it possible that publishers would prefer just to pump out one format rather than worry about that special $200 charge? I do wonder about how things like this fit into the regular XML workflow.
Thanks,
David
Thanks for your response, David. Just to be clear, I am not “weighing in with the pro-DRM side,” I am simply noting that converting/producing a DRM-based format is not necessarily more expensive than a non-DRM one.