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A Kindle conversion: why the EPUB argument stopped mattering
November 28, 2011 | 10:14 am
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By Paul Biba
I’ve long felt, and written, that Epub is much ado about nothing, especially since its creators don’t license the trademark and enforce standards. Without enforceable standards what good is it?
Now comes an interesting article, with the above title, from the Amazon Kindle Blog. Here’s a snippet:
My own change of opinion regarding the importance of the eBook format conflict stems from purely practical matters. We have reached a point where there is literally nothing you can’t do with a Kindle that can be done on another device. Library books are plentiful, no author or publisher is likely to boycott the Kindle platform in favor of the competition, and on the off chance that you find a DRM-free eBook you want on your device you can convert it for free with Calibre (a practical necessity for the eBook enthusiast in case you haven’t adopted already. Google it!). In a situation where the format itself offers no particular advantage inherent to itself, there is no longer much reason to cling to it. There is a reason you don’t see much use of HD-DVD anymore, or Betamax before that.
Read the rest.
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Comments:
Commented over on the original post, but it’s in moderation limbo. Copied here:
“We have reached a point where there is literally nothing you can’t do with a Kindle that can be done on another device.”
This is a patently false statement.
You can’t do fixed layout books on Kindle, you can’t do DOM scripting on Kindle, you can’t do many CSS3 effects on Kindle, you can’t do audio and video on KF8 (for now). These are all capabilities that are, to one degree or another, supported on other, EPUB-based platforms.
While Amazon is doing an admirable job at bringing their KF8 format up to feature-parity with other reading systems (and, to their credit, many of the deficiencies that I list above are probably coming soon), it’s not accurate to say that the Kindle platform offers the same features of other reading systems (most notably iBooks).
All that being said, I don’t disagree with the main point of your post—formats and DRM are becoming more and more invisible to the end-user; and that’s as it should be. As you say, user/customer experience trumps all, and Amazon does have one of the most customer-centric cultures around.
What seems most likely is that EPUB will remain the industry-strandard from a production perspective: publishers will produce ebooks using EPUB, and then convert to whatever format (DRMed EPUB, KF8, etc.) a retailer specifies, using tools like Amazon’s own Kindlegen converter.
As for your assertion that “There is only so much you can do in order to essentially show off text in an attractive manner,” well, clearly you’re not a book designer
Book design is a highly expressive discipline, both in print and in digital (pick up ten books at a bookstore, and open them all up side-by-side—odds are that no two will be alike).
Pablo Defendini is right. The Kindle Blog writer is clueless about what what book layout entails. Amazon’s mobi fomat can’t handle any text more complicated than that of a novel or a simple biography. Books with quotes look awful. Books with sidebars and tables are impossible. Few school textbooks can be rendered into mobi. Right now, the text that Kindles can display is far inferior that of the first movable-type books of some 500 years ago. We shouldn’t forget that mobi was invented to display text on little Palms in the 1990s.
That’s why Amazon has announced and is developing new formats like KF8. Hopefully, it’ll be close enough to ePub that conversions between the two will have few glitches.
I have a collection of around 100 ePub titles I’ve purchased, mostly from O’Reilly Media. I’ve compared some of them with their mobi versions and the different is night and day. The mobi versions rely on inline images to display code samples, while the epub files simply format the code blocks with appropriate css.
One of the reasons digital music software and players work so well is that they support multiple formats. eBook readers *should* be no different, and there is no technical reason whatsoever that the Kindle couldn’t support ePub files. It is simply that their business model is incompatible with it.
“There is only so much you can do in order to essentially show off text in an attractive manner” does seem to be a common attitude given the horrible formatting errors I’ve seen in some of the eBooks I’ve purchased. But I have to say I’ve seen more frequent errors – particularly misplaced paragraph breaks – in the Kindle books I’ve bought than in the ePubs, from a variety of publishers. eBooks need to be proofed and checked just as print books do, but it seems like most publishers are throwing the electronic manuscript through a formatting program and not looking past the table of contents.
Finally, a blog entry on a web site called blogkindle.com is probably not an unbiased source.
I view KF8 in the same way I viewed Micorosoft’s bastardized version of Java. Sun successfully sued Microsoft about this and Java is now better for that. Amazon isn’t calling KF8 “EPUB” so they’ve learned from history. IDPF will need to keep a close eye on Amazon.
To Paul’s first point on this blog, I think the big deal is HTML5 not EPUB. HTML5 (more broadly Web Standards and browser runtime) is the universal platform. But HTML5 is focused on applications and the only thing you can do with an arbitrary website and its tangled scripts is “execute” it in a browser and see what happens. So it makes sense for there to be a spec for “reliable” HTML5 for long-form digital publications – that enables interoperability via distribution channels, manipulation, navigation, accessibility, etc.. These needs exist even if documents in the future generally sit in the cloud vs being downloaded as artifacts. That’s the niche EPUB 3 aims to fill. We’ll see what KF8 is – at this point it’s still vaporware.
To Paul’s point about licensing trademarks, the IDPF only received a trademark on EPUB last year and we are still evaluating licensing policies. We did work to make specs for EPUB 3 more clear with respect to both content and Reading System conformance, recognizing that this has been an overly gray area in the past. That said IMO the ultimate “enforcement” comes from the ecosystem that uses a standard insisting on compliance, which will happen if and only if doing so delivers concrete benefits (which I believe we’ll find to be the case with EPUB 3).
Just a note, it would be über nice if the citation of the “kindle blog” mentioned that this is by no means an official amazon kindle blog.
Instead of :
“Now comes an interesting article, with the above title, from the Amazon Kindle Blog. Here’s a snippet:”
It would have been nice with:
“Now comes an interesting article, with the above title, from the (unofficial) Amazon Kindle Blog. Here’s a snippet:”
On the subject, the kindle format (until KF8 is pushed to new and old kindles alike) is terrible at displaying verbose text such as code and mathematical notations.
“Library books are plentiful, no author or publisher is likely to boycott the Kindle platform in favor of the competition”
I don’t know about in favor of the competition but Penguin most certainly has decided not to participate in the Kindle library deal with it’s new offerings (for the moment anyway).
@helen, it’s not just Kindle (that was for existing titles and they recinded that), Penguin has suspended/delayed library sales of new ebooks all together for now.
Re Bill McCoy’s comments on HTML 5, I think that the big deal is HTML 5 and EPUB. Here’s why I think that.
The W3C and others have been working long, hard and successfully on maintaining the integrity, futurity and wide adoption of HTML 5 (even Internet Explorer is on board now). This is good for eBooks generally and EPUB in particular since they are so closely related at the markup level. That relationship is getting closer all the time. Our eReaders are based more and more on web rendering engines (e.g. iBooks is based heavily upon WebKit as are Safari, Chrome and other web browsers). Therefore, EPUB will benefit more from the larger and more influential HTML 5 community than those eBook formats that ignore or diverge from the HTML 5 standard.
However, eBooks require a container — especially on sandboxed mobile devices that may not always have network access. Unlike web sites, eBooks have to be self-contained modules in the form of a single file (archive of files actually) in order that they may be disseminated and consumed in an efficient and organized manner. Even in the “cloud,” they will have to be singularly identifiable in the same way that a song, movie, app or TV or Podcast episode are identifiable.
So there is a strong symbiosis between EPUB and HTML 5 that will redound to the benefit of those who faithfully follow the EPUB standard. Others will be on their own and will have a harder row to hoe.
The main thing you still can’t do with a Kindle is buy a book from a retailer other than Amazon.
“The main thing you still can’t do with a Kindle is buy a book from a retailer other than Amazon.”
Not true at all, it depends on what you like to read. It’s only true for publishers who use DRM, but there are plenty of other books out there that you can buy from non-Amazon sources and use on the Kindle.
In addition to what Pablo and Bill noted, what most readers are probably unaware of is that many publishers are using EPUB files as the baseline format for the files provided to Amazon. We tweak our EPUBs to make them Kindle-friendly. If you read the specs for Kindle closely, you’ll find a lot of EPUB language. Even though Amazon doesn’t use EPUB, there are shared elements. So, it looks like EPUB is pretty useful, even for Kindle formatting.
I’ve seen people have terrible formatting issues with things converted to Kindle format from Microsoft Word files.
I haven’t seen anyone having formatting issues with things converted to Kindle format from ASCII text with hand-coded HTML.
“Oh but you can’t do–” Maybe you don’t need to do that, then. If a specific text layout is absolutely critical to the presentation and enjoyment of your media then a commodity E-reader is not the platform you need to be aiming for.
As someone who spent a period as a web designer and managing a web design business I agree DD. Anyone in Web Design and familiar with html knows that when any Microsoft Office application converts one of it’s docs into html, it creates masses of html detritus mixed in with the coding. An average html coder or decent WYSIWYG application allied with basic ASCII or text is the simplest and most effective solution. This must apply to eBooks as well even though I am not specifically familiar with the eBook formats.
Translating Howard’s comment into authorese: “don’t use Microsoft Word or Microsoft Office: they do sloppy work”. He’s right. It’s hard to imagine how any app can make such a mess of simple tasks, but they do.
The easiest thing for any desktop system is to use the free, cross-platform ePub editor Sigil. (It has both a writing view and a code view. The writing view is just like writing on a blank page. The code view shows you how your writing gets formatted in the ebook. It’s not difficult to understand.)
Other viable options: on Macs, use Pages, then ask it to Save As… ePub. On Windows, look for an “HTML editor” which gives you a “WYSIWYG” view (the blank page look, with no code). If you’re on Linux, you have a wide choice of configurable editors.
There is also an increasing number of writer-friendly apps for mobile devices. WriteRoom for iPad looks good.
Two comments on Clytie Siddall’s remarks:
1) Re MS Word output, I’m assuming that we’re talking about exporting to HTML for subsequent conversion to EPUB (via calibre for example). Yes, MS Word outputs some of the most convoluted looking code you’ll see (tons of “extra” XML statements) so as to facilitate what they call “round trip” editing. However, this can be mitigated to a significant degree by opting to “Save only display information into HTML” (Word 2008 for Mac). Something like this should be available in other versions of Word.
2) Pages for Mac is a very good option, especially if you use the Apple-supplied template linked to on this support document: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4168
Direct link: http://images.apple.com/support/pages/docs/ePub_Best_Practices_EN.zip
This template is also a tutorial of sorts and points out options that might escape notice otherwise.
Another promising EPUB creation tool is Book Creator for iPad (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/book-creator-for-ipad/id442378070?mt=8). It is quite simple at this point and focused on “fixed layout” for iBooks but in talking with the folks at Red Jumper, I understand that adding ambient audio and “read aloud” may be added in the near future.
Authoring for iBooks on the iPad has the advantage of being able to immediately see how the finished product looks and behaves. Strangely, an iBooks app is not available under MacOS X so this kind of workflow isn’t currently possible there.
Another promising mobile EPUB creation tool is Book Creator for iPad (http://www.redjumper.net/bookcreator/). The focus is on “fixed-layout” for iBooks and the current iteration is quite simple. In talking with the folks at Red Jumper, I learned that they are thinking about adding ambient audio and “read aloud.”
Being on the iPad, this app provides a nice workflow where output can immediately be verified in the iBooks app, something that cannot yet be done on MacOS X.