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Well-hyped Kindle 2 will probably diss the ePub standard—and meanwhile the snoozin’ IDPF even lacks an ePub logo
February 7, 2009 | 3:28 pm
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By David Rothman
"The 1.2 firmware (for Kindle 1) is now available for download. It includes image zoom, which is nice, but it also includes ‘Greek characters and monospace fonts.’ This probably means that the Kindle 2 won’t include ePub, because the only reason for adding monospaced fonts is to better support technical ebooks without taking the obvious step of switching to ePub." – Alan Wallcraft in just-posted comment.
The TeleRead take: That’s a reasonable conclusion even if we haven’t nailed down for sure that the K2 will diss ePub. Jeff doesn’t always play well with others. Ask some folks at Toys ‘R Us.
Amazon is a stellar company in many ways. But respect for the durability of books—which proprietary formats threaten—is not one of them.
The snoozin’ IDPF
The hype-filled intro of the Kindle 2 is one more reminder that the International Digital Publishing Forum has lagged in marketing and improving its ePub standard. Have I missed something. Or is the IDPF still not coming out with an ePub logo for consumer use—as appears to be the case?
The ePub logo you see above is merely an unofficial one from Travis Alber of BookGlutton.
Come on, IDPF. ePub is a holy cause, potentially a way to make e-books as easy to buy as audio CDs without one giant Amazon-style company dominating the content or technology with a proprietary approach. Doesn’t the IDPF have any marketing sense on this issue, when Amazon is trying to make "Kindle" mean the same as "e-book"? Why, Rip Van Winkle-like, is the leading e-book trade organization sleeping away? Not to protect the usual suspect, I’d hope. Please note this is tough-love, not tough-hate. I want the IDPF to survive and flourish. I wouldn’t sound this alarum if I didn’t care.
If nothing, the IDPF’s ePub in an improved form could make it easy for people to share annotations within books, as well as for links to happen from one book to others. That’s what standards can do. But the IDPF won’t act. I blame publishers, too—for being so miserly with the group and not looking ahead to tomorrow’s more interactive books. Meanwhile you can bet there there’s a reason why Amazon improved the keyboard in the K2. Better interactivity—to make Kindle books more of a social experience. That’s to the company’s credit, but also one more threat, indirectly, to the IDPF’s e-book standards in the long run if Amazon keeps dissing ePub.
The IDPF has many good things going for it, it has a capable director in Mike Smith, and I’d love to learn why the group has been so slow to come out with an ePub logo and robust standards for shared annotations and interbook linking. Partly because some people in the the IDPF want a DRM standard—a problematic matter, technically—before it will unleash a logo? Bad excuse. All along the IDPF has said it’s decoupled ePub from the DRM debate. What about the small, DRM-hating publishers who could benefit now from the logo?
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Comments:
Keep banging the ePub drum.
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.
Nod,nod, nod! And maybe offer nonDRMed books as well? Thanks, Mike! David
There’s no reason for Amazon to adopt epub, they have a vertical monopoly going with kindle, kindle editions, and the amazon storefront. Man, they can win it all with this approach, right up until the various governments start to crack down on them — why should they stop?
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.
It’s time to find another holy cause. You’ve been flogging ePub here forever and despite little victories here and there, it doesn’t seem to be happening.
Why not simple HTML/XML inside of a zip file?
It’s very frustrating that they don’t develop an ePub reader for PDAs, phones, etc. That’s the real reason that the format is not taking off. Why worry about reflow if you’re not going to go for handhelds?
Pond, Monica and Starbookzz:
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
I’ll offer my two cents.
@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.