image I loved it the other day when Times Emit described the TeleBlog as "excellent" if "militant." Actually the two words go well together.

We’d be remiss in our duties to readers, writers and publishers if we didn’t take pokes at eBabel—all those confusing, clashing e-book formats, aggravated by proprietary, consumer-hostile DRM schemes. Our goal is simple. We want to make e-books a mass phenomenon. This is why we—in this case ePub advocates like Jon Noring, Mike Cook, Hadrien Gardeur and me—fight the war against eBabel and DRM.

Along with eBabel, DRM is both a sales and literary toxin. The issue isn’t just ease of use. eBabel makes it impossible to own "protected" e-books for real or confidently know that future generations can read them a century from now. A standard format like ePub won’t solve all issues, but could go a long way toward this goal, especially without DRM to muck things up. I was delighted to see Pan Macmillan offering a Gary Gibson novel and others in ePub without DRM and hope that authors will join the fight against "protection." ePub books with DRM are better than "protected" books in proprietary core formats. But then, as we know, DRM in effect turns ePub books into eBabel, and so far the IDPF, the group behind ePub, has yet to offer a logo for DRMless ePub books to help shoppers deal with compatibility issues. I hope that clueful publishers will prod the IDPF to do its job here.

Meanwhile, unwittingly, Katy Guest, writing in the Independent about the Sony Reader’s arrival in the U.K., reminds us that the current e-book tech is far from easy to use for many nontechies. And I suspect that DRMless ePub could help, whether or not she’s aware of the technical issues. In her words:

  • The eReader comes pre-loaded with an eclectic selection of 14 books and extracts: Patrick Bishop’s 3 Para, Agatha Christie, a historical romance called The Wicked Earl… The menu is easy to navigate, but problems started when I tried to download something to test its legendary battery life. (6,800 page turns, according to Sony – or, in the new unit of measurement, five readings of War and Peace.) The eReader comes with a CD containing 100 classic titles; but I couldn’t make it work. Was it just me? There not being a 13-year-old boy available, I called IT. They didn’t understand it. I tried Sony’s technical support helpline. "To be honest, it’s the same for us," said a friendly man. "It’s new…" In the time I spent listening to their funky hold music, I could have read War and Peace five times – in a real book. I could have learned to read, for heaven’s sake.
  • It wasn’t much clearer at the Gutenberg Project website, where eager readers can download 100,000 books – 25,000 of them free. That is, if they can understand the instructions. The site advises: "Palm OS up to release 4… does not support .txt files stored on internal memory. You will have to convert to .pdb or .prc in order to store Project Gutenberg texts on these machines." Somebody must understand this, because more than three million books are downloaded from the site each month.
  • Things went slightly better with the Iliad – but only thanks to a nice man at iliadreader.co.uk and something called Mobipocket. He’s updating his instruction leaflet for people like me, he reassures me. By the end of our conversation I had Pride and Prejudice in e-form and had equipped the Iliad to update itself nightly with the news from the BBC…

No, I don’t have all the details and can’t be sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Sony’s DRM complicated matters for Ms. Guest beyond the usual challenges that e-gizmos offer the nontechnical. Last I knew, Sony was DRMing even classics, would you believe. Talk about craziness. I’m grateful to Sony for the Sony Reader’s ability to read the standard ePub format, but Sony needs to go the next step and back off from DRM, when writers and publishers allow this. Last I knew, Dickens and the rest hadn’t any objections. Nor, I would hope, would Penn State, which last I knew was originating the Sony books (reformatted Gutenberg texts?). Without DRM to worry about, perhaps the Sony could load a generous number of classics into the Reader for Ms. Guest’s instant enjoyment.

Meanwhile Gutenberg needs to catch up with major publishers—like Penguin and Hachette—which are looking ahead to ePub. What counts most? Spreading books around or sticking to dogma about formats? Let’s see the Gutenberg site draw 30 million downloads, not just three milion. I want TXT and HTML to continue to be available, but nonDRMed ePub should be the featured format, ideally well integrated with software such as Stanza. In other words, people should see a catalogue feature in their readers, click for a list of collections from different sources, then choose books within them. The rumored wireless Sony Reader ideally will allow users to add free and commercial sites via WiFi or other means and maybe even include means to expedite e-commerce. Gutenberg ideally can be part of this world. Commendably some Gutenberg people have shown an openness to the use of ePub, but ideally they’ll be proactive. Encouragingly, at least indirectly, Stanza already can seamlessly downlead some ePub titles from Gutenberg.

The importance of owning books for real

Here’s another topic that Ms. Guest brings up: "The ownership of books is a big deal, of course. Books do furnish a room, as Anthony Powell knew. There is nothing like finding your A-level notes – or your parents’ – in an ancient Penguin paperback. Your new temporary crush can’t scrawl his book recommendations on the title page of the novel you are reading if that novel is trapped inside 260g of plastic. And imagine walking into a new acquaintance’s house to find no books. It wouldn’t seem right to examine the contents of a friend’s Kindle while he was out of the room making coffee."

Actually, in the era of blog and Facebook and the like, it is easier than every for the world to know what you want them to—about your reading habits. The real question is, What happens if books in a proprietary format or DRMed titles are no longer quite so conveniently available to you because a company went out of business or changed its strategy? As the recent MSN and Yahoo music debacles show, these issue are not academic.

Granted, e-books sales are up. But they would be much higher if book-lovers like Ms. Guest didn’t have to play geek.

Speaking of Gutenberg: As far as I know, all the books on the main Gutenberg site are free. Was Ms. Guest confusing the main site with another using the Gutenberg name? If so, that’s all the more reason for PG founder Michael Hart to turn the Project Gutenberg trademark over to the people behind gutenberg.org and let them develop revenue sources, with provisions for fair compensation for him and CEO Greg Newby. The trademark issue makes it harder for Gutenberg to raise money. Michael’s ownership of the trademark give him too much influence over the board.

(Thanks to Sam Hendrix and Mike Cane.)

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