My Publishers Weekly essay on the Tower of eBabel

Publishers Weekly is the trade publication for the book industry in the States.

This morning you can go to PW’s site and see my essay, Razing The Tower Of e-Babel: The reason e-books haven’t caught on is simple: they’re too complicated.

My pet example comes from the Fairfax County Public Library, which, along with many other institutions and people, is an eBabel victim. I tell how my borrowed Pepper Pad could not “handle the Fairfax County Public Library’s digital editions of Mike Wallace’s Between You and Me, Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink or Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian. The Pepper Pad, it turns out, cannot yet cope with anything in Adobe Reader—the only text format in which the library system, the largest in Virginia, offers those particular books. Although Pepper has been out for many months, it can read copy-protected books solely in Mobipocket format, at least for now.”

The eBabel Tower: At least 20 clashing formats inside

“Welcome to the Tower of e-Babel. The Tower is the bane of publishers, online retailers, librarians and book-lovers. In the past few decades, at least 20 clashing e-book formats have popped up, including the infamous Microsoft Reader, limited to Windows, the Gates-blessed operating system, and no format has performed strongly enough to crush the others…”

I explain the disturbing limitations of the IDPF‘s container format and suggest that the organization get out of the standards business, farming out these important matters to OASIS, where experts “can offer a much wider and deeper range of technical skills.” And, yes, I recommend that a draft version of OpenReader be considered as a starting point. “With the right software features in place, the OpenReader standard will allow forums, blogs and annotations to be visible within books, including even copy-protected titles, making them competitive with the Web.” OSoft‘s dotReader, the first implementation of the OpenReader standard, offers all those features, and I hope other software houses will also adopt the format and turn their backs on eBabel.

Needed: A standards-setting sea, not just a frog pond

But the real people making the decision in the end should be the standards-setters, and they should come from beyond the usual range of suspects. The interests of publishers and librarians and society in general should prevail above those of the technology companies dominating the e-book scene. The idea isn’t to hurt ETI or Adobe or the others, however. Rather, with a greater range of people offering wisdom on XML, DRM, multimedia integration and so on, the standards will be more robust—more future-proof and Adobe and the rest can more confidently plan ahead. Significantly, Microsoft doesn’t care a whit about the IDPF’s efforts. Bill Gates’s people are quietly working on their own standards, prepared to bulldoze away the competition, which, by having standards happen in the IDPF frog pond, rather than the OASIS sea, will detract from the credibility of the end results.

While PW isn’t taking sides, it’s encouraging that this venerable and influential magazine has seen the eBabel issue to be worthy of public discussion from a public-interest perspective.