E-Book Standards Fight
thestandard.com
July 31, 2000
Digital Publishing: An Open E-Book
Two e-book standards are duking it out for dominance. Publishers don't much care which one wins, as long as one of them does.
By Mark Frauenfelder
In early July, Laura Nolan of literary agency Sobel Weber auctioned the anthology rights to five magazine stories written by mystery author James Ellroy. Normally, such news would barely merit a mention in Publisher's Weekly. It wouldn't even be noticed by the mainstream press. But Nolan was selling the digital rights to Ellroy's GQ pieces, and that made all the difference. USA Today heralded the event as an "historic step" in the journey from tree books to e-books. (Contentville won the rights over four other bidders. Neither Contentville nor Sobel Weber would disclose the price.)
The Ellroy auction, along with Stephen King's recent forays into e-publishing, make it clear that online books are ready for prime time. But behind the stories of big-name authors and slick new e-book gadgets, there's competition between multibillion-dollar companies vying to control the way online books will be formatted, distributed and displayed. On one side, there's Adobe, pushing its widespread PDF, or portable document format, as the de facto e-book file standard; on the other side, there's Microsoft (MSFT) and Gemstar, the chief architects behind a new, open e-book formatting specification called OEB, or open e-book. The two groups are banging their drums, hoping to persuade everyone to march along to their particular technology. And publishers, software companies, device makers and consumers are warily following along, hoping they aren't going to end up in Betamax-land.
Even though e-book sales are just a drop in the bucket compared with the $22 billion traditional book market, that won't always be the case. And neither Adobe, Gemstar nor Microsoft wants to be left out of another digital revolution. For Adobe, if PDF beats OEB to remain the digital publication standard, e-books would be published using Adobe's proprietary format, and those books would be sold using Adobe's DRM, or digital-rights management, technology. The company would make money on the software it sells to create PDF files, and it would get a piece of every online book transaction. For Microsoft, an OEB victory would mean increased sales of its new Windows CE operating system, which features OEB reading software called Microsoft Reader. And for Gemstar, which in January bought SoftBook and NuvoMedia, currently the only dedicated e-book device companies, OEB's dominance would mean it made the right decision to use the file format in its device, which will be manufactured by Philips.
Publishers by and large don't care which format wins, as long as there's one clear winner so they don't have to double their efforts by publishing two or more versions of every e-book they release.
At first glance, Adobe seems to have a lot going for it. With its excellent reputation among designers for its high-quality type layout and illustration software, Adobe already has strong ties to the book and magazine publishing industry. Its PDF file format, which has been around since 1991, stores electronic documents in a way that closely mimics the look and feel of pages in a book. PDF files are self-contained: Text, images, and fonts are all combined in a single file. Whether read on screen or printed out, a PDF file is a pixel-perfect facsimile of the document's original design. Publishers typically store their book and magazine content in Adobe PostScript, which can be directly converted to Adobe PDF with a program called Adobe Acrobat. Translating a word processing or desktop publishing document to PDF is a push-button process.
Currently, Adobe has a huge head start over OEB. Over 110 million copies of Adobe Acrobat Reader have been downloaded, and an additional 100,000 copies are downloaded every day. Compare these numbers to the 20,000 or so dedicated reading devices that have been sold by Gemstar subsidiaries NuvoMedia and SoftBook – both of which display OEB, not PDF, files.
Adobe also has an advantage when it comes to selling e-books. Since late 1999, the company has been bundling a "Web Buy" plug-in with the Acrobat Reader, allowing users to purchase and read locked documents from merchants who use Adobe's royalty-based PDF Merchant system.
With Adobe's dominance in design, production, market penetration and sales, what gives anyone – even Microsoft – the idea they can wrest control of the e-book from Adobe? The reason is simple, says David Ornstein, the OEB Forum president. As one of the primary writers of the OEB specification, Ornstein is betting that publishers will flock to a truly open standard. The OEB Forum currently has 59 members, including IBM, Palm, HarperCollins, McGraw Hill, Random House, Nokia (NOK) and even Adobe.
The strength of the open e-book publication structure, according to Ornstein, is that it is a kind of "HTML for e-books," while "PDF is basically closed." It's true, he says, that Adobe publishes the specs for PDF, "but it is simply impossible for it to evolve and take advantage of the requirements as the market grows in a way that incorporates all the players."
The crux of the matter is that PDF e-books are designed much like tree books: The words and pictures on a page are fixed in place. If you try to read a PDF file on a screen that is smaller than the monitor the file was designed for, you'll be able to read only a small part of a page at a time. But an OEB-formatted e-book can be designed so the text and images reflow to fit any screen – from a desktop system's 20-inch monitor to a smartphone's five-line display.
"The name of the game is to be able to take content and repurpose it into anything," adds Ornstein, who is also CTO at Gemstar's NuvoMedia, makers of the Rocket e-book device. "Adobe is in deep trouble. It has a tremendously potent position right now, but I can't imagine how it's going to get better. I can only see how it is going to get worse."
SIDE BY SIDE
Comparing the features of PDF and OEB
FEATURE PDF OEB
Open specification Yes Yes
Proprietary Yes No
Layout separate from content No Yes
Dedicated devices available now No Yes
Built-in digital-rights management Yes No
Based on XML No Yes
Text, graphics, fonts in one file Yes No
Scales to fit screen size No Yes
Source: Adobe And OEB Forum
As Adobe spokeswoman Layla McHale puts it, PDF revenues represent "a significant chunk of our business." During the first two quarters of 2000, the company's PDF sales and licensing brought in $97.2 million of Adobe's total revenues of $582.3 million. And that percentage is likely to increase in quarters to come, since PDF revenue has increased from 7 percent of the total business in 1998 to 12.7 percent in 1999 and 17 percent so far this year.
Adobe says it has lots of wonderful developments in the works that will make mincemeat out of Ornstein's argument. Tom Prehn, Adobe's group manager for business development, says a new version of the PDF spec will allow text and images to reflow to accommodate different devices, and it has working prototypes of PDF readers for Palms and Windows CE devices.
Meanwhile, a company called Everybook has announced a Linux-based color device that will display PDF. It has no plans to make PDF software for any dedicated book-reading devices. Another company, Glassbook, has PDF-based software that lets users read PDF-formatted e-books by turning the laptop screen on its side.
As for PDF being a closed format, Prehn disagrees. PDF is open, he says, and what's more, Adobe is a member of the OEB Forum. That's because Adobe "supports an industry and dialog around open standards." But naturally, the open standard Adobe has in mind is its own PDF, not OEB.
Too bad, say the two companies chiefly responsible for OEB. Microsoft has been making deals left and right with online bookstores like Barnesandnoble.com and Contentville to offer e-books in the Microsoft Reader format, and Henry Yuen, chairman and chief executive of Gemstar, has told publishers that his company will engage in a media awareness campaign to turn e-book devices into a "product category." With NuvoMedia and SoftBook in his pocket, Yuen could stand to profit; Jupiter Communications (JPTR) predicts that in five years there will be 6.5 million dedicated e-book devices, and that annual e-book sales could exceed $125 million.
Those numbers sound good to merchants gearing up for an e-book explosion, like Barnesandnoble.com, which currently sells e-books for Gemstar's Rocket e-book and recently announced it would offer 2,000 Microsoft Reader titles later this summer.
But if Rocket editions and Microsoft Reader editions are both OEB-compliant, which they are, then why does Barnesandnoble.com have to offer each version separately? After all, one of OEB's strong points is supposed to be that publishers won't have to make a different version of an e-book document for each device on which it's displayed.
In most cases, they won't. Publishers will just make one OEB file for each e-book they publish, leaving it to device makers and online retailers to customize the document for a particular device and attach the necessary digital-rights security software. Still, that means someone – most likely, the retailer – has to deal with the hassles of multiple versions of the same e-book. "It's extra work," says Ken Brooks, VP of digital content for Barnesandnoble.com, adding that multiple versions can lead to "customer confusion." Even so, he says Barnesandnoble.com plans to continue to "embrace OEB and PDF," even though "it would be nice if they could come together in a happy family."
Adobe joining Microsoft at the dinner table? Brooks realizes that's unlikely. Anyway, OEB's openness is an "outstanding development," and PDF's WYSIWYG capability is "great for design-intensive material." While he sees a place for both formats, Brooks better not say that in mixed company.
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Mark Frauenfelder is a writer and illustrator based in Los Angeles.
tekboy@canIstillgetoptionsonbetamax?.org
PS there was one more chart at the bottom, about companies, that I couldn't reproduce, but you can just read it via the link if you want. |
