The annual one day conference on May 14 of the International Digital Book Forum (IDPF), provided evidence that the latest innovations and experiments in e-book publishing, marketing and distribution have permanence in the market and in the support of new technologies. They are here to stay and on the way.
Steve Potash, CEO of Overdrive and President of IDPF, opened this year's session as he has every year, with a confident forecast that industry efforts to develop an open and common eBook platform standard would pay off for everyone. This year, he was able to announce the successful release of the standards last year, and the introduction of the common XML file extension of ".epub" for reflowable books and publications.
These standards for digitally "packaging" and providing meta data and tagging content, have been accompanied by breakthroughs in publishing strategies, digital search, browsing tools (look inside, widgets), and most critically, portable reader technology.
The Sony Reader, Amazon Kindle and iRex Iliad have replaced backlighting, and use the reflective e-Ink screen that simulates the page turning and reading experience on paper, while providing the search, bookmarking, highlighting, and variable type size features of digital technology. Moreover, e-Ink only uses power when the page is changed, and not when the new page has come to rest. And the most user-friendly bump to the market—soon to be copied by other devices—is the Kindle function that provides a one click effortless wireless download of any book out of its browsable catalog.
The Google book search program—with more than one million books on line and growing, and Windows Alive's archive—are providing point and click opportunities for readers to go from their browse to the publisher to order the book—in print or in electronic version. Not to mention Amazon's ahead of the pack point and click, Barnes and Noble, Powell's, Borders,, et al.
Publishers are beginning to innovate in their e-Book offerings. Witness Harlequin's launch of two short subject romance series (Spice) and Random House's free give away of an e-Book (Suze Orman) that stimulated a new spike in print sales. Service providers such as Overdrive, Ingram Digital (including MyiLibrary and Vital Source) and Libre Digital, are providing publishers with large-scale digital e-Book and audio archiving, distribution and re-purposing services to broaden consumer choices.
Quietly working in the trenches, the all volunteer IDPF standards committee headed by eBook veteran Garth Conboy, President of eBook Technologies, designed and put through a meticulous process of review and release in the past three years for the three container and platform standards now being adopted by publishers and device manufacturers. They laid the groundwork for interoperability of e-books in this promising new marketplace. (If you are into technology, go to
http://idpf.org/specs.htm for a summary description as well as for detail on the OCF (Open Container Format), OPS (Open Publishing Structure) and OPS (Open Packaging Format) standards).
This means that the publisher will need to produce only one format (xml based), from which various applications can be converted and distributed. To the extent that device distributors accommodate the platform standards, and publishers relax their content protection barriers—the reader will be able to make one purchase and use their e-book in multiple ways in an after-market environment.
Of course this will raise a new set of identification and numbering problems. Most publishers now provide a separate ISBN for each ebook plantform for the same title (mobipocket, windows, Sony, iRex, Kindle). By publishing one open eBook formatted .epub version, the publisher can get by with one isbn and will no longer need to track the various other platform versions serviced by their distributors. So, it will fall to the distributors to create distinguishing product numbers in order, in turn, to account for their different offerings, (There is no escape!).
The continued ubiquity of the book as a reading device has distracted our attention from the breakthrough in electronic readers and books for the general public. Slow in coming, authors, publishers, distributors and retailers have remained complaisant—worried more about the decline in book readers than the uptick in electronic readers.
Well, the electronic reader—in both senses of the word—has leapfrogged out of the early adopter stage into a growing mainstream of device-equipped business travelers, immersive readers, college students, professional field workers and audio book/multimedia users (both Kindle and Sony have audio capability).
After writing about e-Book developments for the past ten years, I have acquired my first readers: a Sony and a Kindle, and I am getting used to using them. For my most recent five day trip to Chicago, I down-loaded on my Kindle in about a minute, for $9.95, Doris Kearns Goodwin's
Team of Rivals, which took up no more space than a 5x7 notebook and rested in my palms with the comfort of a trade paperback
I still like to go to bed with a printed book – especially a paperback—that I can grab, flex, and earmark—my current victim is
The Kite Runner—but on a flight and in a hotel room where I don’t have to take up space with the bulk of a printed book, I have to confess, I've been hooked.
Posted by: Eugene Schwartz, Editor-at-Large