which format will win?

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Zetmolm

@Harry,
This is somewhat off topic, but still:
You refer to the 'allofmp3'-construction. Do you have proof that these sites use a similar loophole? They claim to have agreements with the publishers of the books they make available.
Also, on the site of ast.ru, for instance, which is one of the biggest publishers in Russia, you'll find links to some cheap web shops. They would not do that if they don't get any money from those shops, would they? And these shops also sell fb2, without DRM!

But reading "any book you want", free online, or download for less than US$1? It sounds too good to be true. Perhaps I'm just being cynical, but I can't see this being legit. Perhaps, though, I'm wrong. I certainly have no evidence one way or the other.

[GhostHawk]

Why Epub?

Because its relatively easy to put DRM on it? Same for PDF?

You can't open it on a pc without first loading special software for it.
Which is not true of several other formats.

[BillSmithBooks]

Originally Posted by GhostHawk

Why Epub?

Because its relatively easy to put DRM on it? Same for PDF?

You can't open it on a pc without first loading special software for it.
Which is not true of several other formats.

My thoughts exactly.

Epub has been pushed as an "open format" but every publisher has its own incompatible form of DRM...I think this is going to end up exploding in Epublishing's face once consumers wise up.

Readers are going to demand DRM-free ebooks (that are inexpensive) and publishers had best get with the program or they will face the same fate the music labels have faced.

I'm pretty sure 5, 10, maybe even 20 years from now, people will still be reading HTML. I don't see Epub having that staying power.

Everything can read HTML, it's easily converted to other formats and there are countless free, easy authoring tools. Sure, there are issues--different specs, non-standard tags, and so forth. HTML books in Zip folders nicely resolve things like "multi-media" books with lots of photos, etc.

But despite the fact that HTML is not the most elegant or sophisticated solution, it is an open, accessible format that millions of people are already familiar with and billions of people can already read with the devices they already own.

PCs, smart phones, netbooks, tablets, Nintendo Wiis, Playstations, XBoxes, palmtops, the new generation of smartbooks that will only have a browser, the IPad, even the Kindle--ALL of them can read HTML ebooks without any additional software. All of them, that is, except for a handful of dedicated ebook readers.

I know I'm going to take a lot of flack for this, but I think HTML could easily be the ebook format of the future, just as MP3 emerged as the clear format of choice for audio despite the format's limitations.

[kennyc]

But epub IS html ... or xhtml ... just arranged in a specific format.

Have you ever opened an epub file -- use winzip or 7zip or .... and take a look.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by BillSmithBooks

I'm pretty sure 5, 10, maybe even 20 years from now, people will still be reading HTML. I don't see Epub having that staying power.

ePub is HTML. It's just a bunch of HTML files in a ZIP wrapper.

HTML is a inefficient format for an ebook, because a book will typically consist of a whole bunch of files - HTML files, images, a table of contents, etc. An ePub book just packages all those up into a ZIP file.

HTML books in Zip folders nicely resolve things like "multi-media" books with lots of photos, etc.

That's exactly what an ePub book is. I'm slightly confused about why you appear to be criticizing ePub on the one hand, and on the other, proposing a "solution" which is ePub!

[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by GhostHawk

Why Epub?

Because its relatively easy to put DRM on it? Same for PDF?

You can't open it on a pc without first loading special software for it.
Which is not true of several other formats.

Basically because the industry recognized they had to pick something, so they went with a format that uses HTML, which lots and lots of people know how to work with. The industry will DRM anything, so that's not going to influence the decision much. PDF can't really reflow well, so even though it produces output that is lightyears ahead of anything else in quality and readability, you're stuck with a static page, and all the work you put into making that chapter look as good as possible in TeX or InDesign for that device just got blown out of the water when you try to reformat it for another device. Very labor intensive, and no publishing house is going to produce multiple font-sized, multiple screen-sized versions in PDF of every one of their books.

I was disappointed with the choice of ePub just because it uses HTML, which was never designed to be a true typographical engine anyway, so it only produces mediocre output at best, and come on, we are talking about reading books here, not simple web pages. It would have been much better if the industry had gone with a wrapper around a TeX-based rendering engine - that would produce output that looks ten times better than HTML right out of the gate. Oh, well - licensing to Knuth might have been an issue, who knows.

[frabjous]

Originally Posted by GhostHawk

You can't open it on a pc without first loading special software for it.
Which is not true of several other formats.

Sorry, but this makes no sense.

You can't read any format without the appropriate software installed. What do you mean by "special"? Do you mean that your operating system comes with the software you need pre-bundled? Surely, what comes prebundled is just a matter of demand. Once books catch on in general, chances are your OS will come with a epub reader. And actually, since your OS comes with a webbrowser and an unzip program, the very simplest of script or plugin is all that needs to be added. You can find scripts or plugins on this website easily enough. (At least barring DRM.)

There aren't some formats that are easier to put DRM on than others. The DRM scheme to PDFs/ePubs are completely unrelated to the part that actually contains the contents of the book. The fact that Adobe's ADEPT DRM is only applied to ePubs and PDFs just reflects that these are the formats they've chosen to use; it could easily be migrated to any other format.

ePub is definitely a better format than most of the competitors out there -- .mobi/kindle format is very inflexible and limited by comparison (as anyone who has ever tried to do anything complex in the format knows), and ePub make use of html and xhtml that a lot of people use for other purposes anyway, so it makes sense to make it a standard.

As of now, PDF is still my preferred format, since it's the only way to get proper typography in ebooks, like kerning and ligatures and end-of-line hyphenation, or to properly typeset mathematics or other formal symbolisms in a robust way. But in principle, I think once ePub supports MathML, SVG images, and gets typographically richer rendering software, it'll eventually match or surpass PDF in my estimation.

[BillSmithBooks]

Originally Posted by kennyc

But epub IS html ... or xhtml ... just arranged in a specific format.

Have you ever opened an epub file -- use winzip or 7zip or .... and take a look.

Yes, quite often.

But that the way the Epub format is promoted IS the problem.

Epub publishers don't tell you, "hey, you can read this on any PC you already own, just change the extension to zip and open."

Instead, "You have to use our reader/software," "Buy our device," etc. and they tremendously muddle the waters...all because they're locking up content with DRM that's incompatible between different distributors. All within an "open" format? Epub's "industry standard" and "openness" is a complete distortion of the truth because of DRM.

Many, many ebook advocates and producers promote Epub as a different format. (I believe they have done this to separate ebooks from "just webpages" so they can sell them.) But most people believe they need a dedicated reader or special software to read ebooks.

I think ebooks could grow much more quickly if the industry line had been, "Yeah, ebooks are just like webpages. Read them on any browser or ebook reader. Please send us $5 to get your book."

It really has been a needless trainwreck.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by BillSmithBooks

Yes, quite often.

But that the way the Epub format is promoted IS the problem.

Epub publishers don't tell you, "hey, you can read this on any PC you already own, just change the extension to zip and open."

Instead, "You have to use our reader/software," "Buy our device," etc. and they tremendously muddle the waters...all because they're locking up content with DRM that's incompatible between different distributors. All within an "open" format? Epub's "industry standard" and "openness" is a complete distortion of the truth because of DRM.
...

Well, true and I do hate drm, but the fact that it is html make it more compatible than many other formats. And I'm sure that's a big part of it's popularity/adoption since tools already exist to edit and display and convert...

[cmdahler]

Originally Posted by frabjous

As of now, PDF is still my preferred format, since it's the only way to get proper typography in ebooks, like kerning and ligatures and end-of-line hyphenation, or to properly typeset mathematics or other formal symbolisms in a robust way. But in principle, I think once ePub supports MathML, SVG images, and gets typographically richer rendering software, it'll eventually match or surpass PDF in my estimation.

I agree with everything you said, but I have to just add a rant: it's insane and ridiculous that the publishing industry is going to spend years reinventing the wheel, when a solution that Donald Knuth probably would have been willing to license for either free or for a minimal cost already exists that does all of these things and does them very, very well. If epub could just be wrapped around the TeX engine, all of these problems could be essentially solved in a month. Sigh.

[frabjous]

Originally Posted by cmdahler

I was disappointed with the choice of ePub just because it uses HTML, which was never designed to be a true typographical engine anyway, so it only produces mediocre output at best, and come on, we are talking about reading books here, not simple web pages. It would have been much better if the industry had gone with a wrapper around a TeX-based rendering engine - that would produce output that looks ten times better than HTML right out of the gate. Oh, well - licensing to Knuth might have been an issue, who knows.

I'm a huge fan of LaTeX, and think it would be great of a rendering engine like LaTeX were used, but don't confuse the file format with the engine that renders it. There's nothing about the HTML format that prohibits getting output as nice as one gets from running latex on its mark-up language. ePub is not a wrapper around an "engine", but a wrapper around some mark-up code. If a wrapper were put around LaTeX code, that wouldn't be an engine either.

Consider for example, Prince XML -- which takes HTML and XHTML as input and creates a PDF, much like LaTeX takes its mark-up source and created DVI or PDF, and the resulting PDF uses end-of-line hyphens (in fact, using the TeX algorithm), ligatures, kerning. The fact that we don't get that from the ePub software on our readers isn't a fault of the ePub format, it's the fault of the software used to render it, which knock on wood, will get better in the future. And they can port as much of LaTeX's engine as they want. The differences in the mark-up languages are trivial. MathML isn't any worse that TeX as a mark-up language. If anything it's better (though slightly less humanly readable.)

[renareto]

Thx to all!
I've never thought to have alla this answer!

Renato

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by BillSmithBooks

But that the way the Epub format is promoted IS the problem.

Epub publishers don't tell you, "hey, you can read this on any PC you already own, just change the extension to zip and open."

Instead, "You have to use our reader/software," "Buy our device," etc. and they tremendously muddle the waters...all because they're locking up content with DRM that's incompatible between different distributors. All within an "open" format? Epub's "industry standard" and "openness" is a complete distortion of the truth because of DRM.

That's not a problem with ePub; it's a problem with publishers and distributors and their marketing methods. They want to say "Here is your EBOOK. It works on [SOFTWARE] or [DEVICE]. If you want more EBOOKS, buy them from us." They don't want you to think of the ebook as "a bundle of html files with an ebook-shaped wrapper;" they don't want you to think of it as "A Word doc output onto fixed letter/A4-sized pages;" they don't want you to think of it as "formatted text with hyperlink-code added for the chapter headers, with pictures shrunk to fit on a 320x320 screen."

They want you to think of it as a "book," like a physical object, that comes with a set of pre-established characteristics that the buyer can't change.

The fact that *none* of the ebook formats work like that is irrelevant. Publishers are working hard to find the format that forces end-users to treat digital content like physical content--fixed and unchangable--with the added bonus (for the publisher) of lacking the ability to transfer ownership.

Their attempts to do this with various formats (ePub and PDF head the list) is not a reflection on the usefulness of those formats.

Publishers are deliberately unclear on what ebooks are and how they work because they want to avoid facing competition (which they will, if you can buy ebooks from anyone for any device) and kill any possibility of a used ebook market. And occasionally because of ignorance. Plenty of them think an "ebook" is somehow intrinsically different from "a Word document."

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by kennyc

.

EPUB

.

In Your Dreams!

Derek

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by kennyc

But epub IS html ... or xhtml ... just arranged in a specific format.

Have you ever opened an epub file -- use winzip or 7zip or .... and take a look.

Ummm... right. So the Adobe PDF epub format is just html??? Think not. Epub is the wrapper and while most *sane* publishers use html, there are other data formats that can be stuffed inside - and don't even get me started on the wide range of DRM one can use on the contents of the epub container!

Derek