Quick, IDPF! Do that ePub logo! Bookseller.com items show need for action before Amazon and Sony steal you mindshare—forever

Hello? When will the International Digital Publishing Forum get it? Bookselling is a brand-driven business; and if the group doesn’t do an ePub logo fast, Amazon and Sony just might steal the IDPF’s mindshare—forever, no recovering it. The present image, well worth consideration, is an unofficial one from the talented Travis Alber.

Alas, I don’t see one bleepin’ mention of ePub in the Bookseller’s article reporting that Simon Juden, CEO of the Publishers Association in the U.K., “has called on the industry to resolve the problem of differing e-book formats as the UK readies itself for the imminent launch of two e-book readers”—the Sony Reader and the Kindle.

For years, people on the payrolls of global publishing conglomerates have signed off on the work of the IDPF. Is this what it comes down to? Will all those efforts wasted because the top people in publishing don’t appreciate the importance of the ePub brand—especially in dealing with book shoppers’ understandable worries, there inside the Tower of eBabel. Come on, IDPF; I’m rooting for you. Get the logo out and explain why proprietary formats are a dead end, and along the way worry about grubby little details such as reading and creation software for ePub.

Salt in the wounds

Rubbing salt into the wounds, by way of a separate item, Philip Jones, managing editor of Bookseller.com, correctly notes the scarcity of reading apps for the ePub format—the same complaint that I and others have been making in the TeleRead blog. Adobe’s Digital Editions is okay but nothing in usability compared to Mobipocket, which can’t read ePub natively and has problematic importation of ePub.

Meanwhile I’d welcome an up-to-the-minute statement from Sony assuring us that, no ifs or buts, it’s still planinng ePub for the DE upgrade set for the Sony Reader. That would help Sony by pre-empting the Amazon Kindle, which, like the Reader at the moment, can’t read ePub. BBeB is a weak format compared to ePub. Get with it, Sony. Standards, please! Would the Reader have gotten as far if it only worked with Sony-blessed memory cards?

Jones does say: “Penguin is using the .epub format, a format already adopted by Hachette Group USA. HarperCollins is expected to go the same route. I am not yet clear what format either Macmillan or Random House are using, but with the weight behind .epub massing, my guess is that this will now become the universally adopted format for most publishers.” That’s all well and good. But then Jones taketh away all that optimism, or at least a good part of it, and I applaud him for doing so, lest the IDPF be smug. Read on.

“Jeff Bezos is the one who really needs convincing”

“It’s my personal view that this is not beneficial to the customer, the content provider or the publisher,” Jones quotes Simon Juden about the warring e-formats—but then the journalist opines that ” it is likely that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is the one who really needs convincing.

“Incidentally, and I’m not making this up, the current ‘hot’ discussion about .epub concerns whether it should be .epub, ePub or, ePUB,” says Jones, linking in to the TeleBlog. “Maybe they should ask: what would Bezos do?”

Exactly. Please, IDPF. Stop being so complacent and act—on the issues of both open source software and the logo. Bertelsmann, the ultimate establishment publisher, has just done a deal with Wikipedia, the ultimate provider of open source content. Mightn’t the publishers reach out to the open source community—including perhaps a little participant in it called IBM—and see about an effort to underwrite open source software to make ePub a meaningful standard? The current move by some publishers away from DRM can only help. Social DRM and/or another form of digital watermarking, anybody? SDRM or no DRM would avoid the traditional DRM problems that would complicate an open source approach, which, after all, depends on openness, no small challenge if you’re relying on DRM. By making legitimate books easy to read off open source software, publishers would actually be fighting piracy and boosting sales. They could still use DMCA-style legislation to crack down on content rip-offs.

Room for both open and proprietary readers

No, I’m not saying that all e-reading software needs to be open source—there’s room for different models. But if publishers backed open source projects, including ePub creation tools, you can bet that tech companies would be far, far more responsive to the book industry’s needs, regardless of possible claims to the contrary. Along the way, tech companies could at least reverse-engineer the better ideas from the open source people, regardless of licensing limitations.

Do publishers really want Jeff Bezos and his ilk to call the shots? A warning from Tim O’Reilly puts it all in perspective: “Publishers beware, Amazon has you in its sights.”