[Bob Russell]

Thanks for your thoughts Roger. I agree that in the right circumstances more complexity is not always bad. HTML is more complex than text, for example. But that's really more of an exception than the rule. It's really tough to get a format universally adopted like HTML or MP3.

But my point is really not that we will never see another universally adopted e-book format (I hope we do), but to point out that just because a format has better features doesn't mean it's better for users. Knowing that you can read a format in almost any e-book reader can outweigh all kinds of other benefits.

Originally Posted by rsperberg

In the first place, a number of your "fancy format" formats are really just HTML under the covers anyway, so the amount extra that they bring to the table isn't much.

Ah, but just because something is HTML-based doesn't mean it's compatible. Once you change it, it's not HTML anymore, even if it's just due to compression My basic point is that compatibility and universality are more imoprtant than improved functionality.

Originally Posted by rsperberg

And then, second, a major reason for their being on the "less compatible" end of the spectrum has nothing whatsoever to do with their complexity/capability and everything to do with proprietary thinking.

If you think about the Open Office document format that has recently been accepted as an ISO standard (and before that as an OASIS specification), it would fall way to the right on the complexity/capability spectrum but, being fully open, has the potential to be all the way on the left in terms of interoperability and acceptance.

Good point, but I don't think "proprietariness" is the key any more than complexity is. They are both just contributing factors to interoperability and universality, which is the key. Proprietariness (is that a word?) is very important to universal adoption, but openness doesn't guarantee compatibility either -- it has to be widely adopted to really add value to a wide audience.

Originally Posted by rsperberg

One thing that I think you want to include as a factor in complexity is not merely the formatting capabilities, but the metadata that an arbitrary XML file can contain. If, for instance, every company name in my history of Wall Street is indicated by <company> tags, then it's easy to search and locate the instances when I'm looking for Charles Schwab the company and not Charles Schwab the person.

If we think of e-books as being designed for current publishing, then markup of metadata seems less significant. But what if every piece of business communication shared the same markup as the e-books? What if the e-reader wasn't an e-book reader, but instead a tool optimized for reading anything and everything we have to read on-screen?

Very cool! You have described a manner in which adding complexity can actually make a format more widely popular. If you add features that allow it to be used across purposes, so that that there can be a common popular format for publishing, e-books, and all kinds of other document usage then it has a much greater chance of success. Makes sense. And an e-book format could then "ride the coattails" of adoption of the format for other purposes. Interesting view!

Originally Posted by rsperberg

I think in that case that fancier formats, or more complex formats, would be so much more useful that they would become the de facto standard and thus widely accepted in many applications.

On the other hand, is it really possible for one format to do all those things well?