How can publishers create graphical e-books without a lot of duplicated effort? That’s the question posed by Richard Stephenson on FutureBook in a post about the different approaches taken by Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple for displaying fixed-layout graphical content on their e-readers: Amazon's Kindle format 8 (KF8) relies on a completely separate process to create a fixed layout e-book than Apple's version of fixed layout for titles that are design-led e-books. Both are based on XHTML, but there are important differences in how pages are laid out. With KF8, each page has to be...

PBS’s MediaShift is running a series on e-books this week, and not all the articles are as lame as the one I talked about earlier asking whether Amazon was short-changing authors. MediaShift’s business columnist Dorian Benkoil wrote a lengthy column complaining about the annoying maze of incompatibility and missing features that purchasers of DRM-locked mass-market e-books have to face. When given a book he wanted to read, Benkoil went looking for an e-book version that he could both read and have read to him, and thought that Google, which is pretty open, would have the best version—but was...

Today Wolfram launched CDF, a new document format that incorporates interactive charts, infographics, tables, and anything else that you can produce in the company's own Mathematica (or that you can import as MathML expressions from Excel and Word). Conrad Wolfram writes, "The idea is to provide a knowledge container that’s as easy to author as documents, but with the interactivity of apps—for CDFs to make live interactivity as everyday a way to communicate as spreadsheets made charts." Although Wolfram is positioning this as an open document format, the readers over at Slashdot are skeptical about the EULA and potential issues down...

On the A List Apart website, Joe Clark has written an extremely good, extremely long essay on why HTML-based formats are becoming the new standard for e-books, and what needs to be done to clean that standard up. Clark points out that HTML “is great for expressing words”—and not just words in websites, but the form of words used for most fiction and some non-fiction books—what Craig Mod called “Formless Content”. Every e-book reader on the market can display some HTML-based formats—everything but the Kindle can do ePub, and the Kindle’s AZW format is just HTML-based in a different...