ZDNET: Apple sabotaging ePub?

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by CommonReader

Amazon and Apple are two peas in a pod; creating their own standards to suppress competition.

Or outrun the competition. (just dont call their products standards; the misuse of the term is part of what is at issue.)

Bear in mind that there is no law of man or nature that forbids proprietary solutions. Historically, proprietary solutions are faster to ramp up, more agile in responding to market needs, and (obviously) more consistent.

Open competition is up to the communitarian/open forces that bear the onus of creating/maintaining competitive open solutions. Don't expect for-profit organizations to sacrifice anything meaningful in the name of open-ness.

Apple itself said it best just this week;

“We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/bu...pagewanted=all

Substitute "epub" for "america" and their position is clear.

And, bear in mind that, while Apple has *never* been a company I care for--I don't like that too much of their business is about milking the unwary, since day one--there are *perfectly valid* reasons for them to do a proprietary solution. (Simple test: how soon will an actual epub3 product hit the market? Amazon already has 4-5 million KF8-capable gadgets out on the street. Apple, at least 30 million iPads. If only 10% are actually used for iBooks, that is still 3 million.)

The whole open-ness issue is essentially a commons problem: everybody wants the *benefits* of an open spec but nobody wants the cost of upholding and defending it.

And so we have an outright and brazen hijack. Or two. Or ten.

In software, most of the big, successful efforts have big, powerful backers capable of defending the project; for all its IP issues, you don't see somebody wrapping Android in proprietary wrappers to make it incompatible and then calling it something else, do you?

Fires, Nooks and Sony's don't deny they run Android even when, like the Nook Tablet, they do everything they can to close up the hardware. Google would not stand for it.

Ditto with Linux, Apache, OpenOffice, Firefox, etc.
The stakehoders and supporters of *those* open efforts watch and protect their product. Lawsuits *have* been filed. Abusers *have* been slapped down. Linux-based readers like the Hanlins and Pocketbooks have been asked to publish their source code and they *have* complied.

If you benefit from open systems you *should* live up to the rules of the system.
But if the system you are leveraging has *no* rules and *no* enforcement...

(shrug)

I keep saying it is not Apple that is at fault here; They have done nothing illegal. (Ethically-challenged, yes. But illegal, no.)
They're just smooth operators taking advantage of the naive and unwary.

Sometimes you *do* have to blame the "victim".
And in this case the "victims" should have known this was coming.

[Katsunami]

If it's not up to Apple to defend epub out solve it's problems, then they should leave the committee at once.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by CommonReader

Amazon and Apple are two peas in a pod; creating their own standards to suppress competition.

There would be no mainstream e-book market if not for Amazon. Amazon created this market, and it did so before anyone else even used epub. How could they suppress competition by not using a standard that wasn't available?
Answer - they could not.

And of course it's not like epubs from Apple, B&N, and now even Kobo are cross-platform compatible: they all use incompatible drms, even if the underlying format is epub compatible (it's not clear that it is in the case of Kobo).

Apple supports and uses the common epub standard, although with their own DRM. But you can't use it to make the kind of books they'd like to see, so they came up with a new standard that will. It's hard to see that as suppressing competition when *there is no competition.* Seriously, who is being suppressed?

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

If it's not up to Apple to defend epub out solve it's problems, then they should leave the committee at once.

Or kicked out.

Neither is going to happen, though.
Need any further proof the <idpf> doesn't care?

[speakingtohe]

Now I am confused. When I bought my first ereader, Kindles were not available in Canada, and I thought that the mobi format was created by another company and purchased by Amazon at a time when .lit and .lrf and even the dreaded .PDF files were widely used.

I may be wrong, but I think there were ereaders before Amazon leapt over tall buildings in a single bound. Amazon has possibly accelerated market growth, but not single handedly created it.

Helen

[Katsunami]

Amazon did not create the ereader or ebook markets, but they did bring it out of obscurity.... Just as Apple did with tablets. There were readers and ebooks before Amazon, but they were not widely used. Believe it or not, there *were* tablets before the iPad, and they ran Windows XP for Tablets

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by murraypaul

If you restrict to using only some features, the book may open in some ePub readers. That doesn't mean that the book is valid ePub, only that the reader accepts it, and it certainly doesn't mean that a book using all features would be.

Originally Posted by Sil_liS

Don't you have the same relation between .doc and .docx?

I don't think the relationship between .iBooks and EPUB is similar to that between .doc and docx. The .doc format is a binary format while the .docx format (per Wikipedia) is basically a zipped XML file (to me it sounds similar to the OpenDocument format).

Based on what I've read in this thread, it sounds to me that the iBooks format and EPUB are like two different version of HTML, where one version (iBooks) has added non-standard tags to the basic format (EPUB). While an EPUB reader might be able to view an ebook with the added tags it might not render the ebook correctly or as intended. If I'm wrong on this, please correct me.

[Redcard]

I think I get what people are saying here. Let me rephrase it.

What SLIS asked was, if they don't want to read EPUB3 books fully, but instead focus on a subset, why not just write a reader that reads EPUB3 books but only supports the subset.

The problem with that logic is, according to the EPUB3 specifications, you must do all or nothing. You can't make a reader that says it reads EPUB3 format that only supports part of the EPUB3 format. If you make an EPUB3 reader, it has to be able to (within reasonable limitations such as DRM) , read all EPUB3 documents. It even has to have the ability to plug-in DRM from multiple sources to enable new content owners to read it.

Apple has chosen to implement only a subset of EPUB3's requirements for their interactive books app. As such, they CANNOT call it EPUB. The reason they can't is because the reader cannot be an EPUB3 Reader. It works both ways, see? The epub version is encoded in the file. Apple cannot use their reader to differentiate between supported or unsupported Epubs. That breaks the standard, and so, they can't call their reader an EPUB reader.

So they elected to call it an .ibook reader. They moved around the issue. Yes, they did it in a proprietary way, but this was the end result ANYWAY. People would be equally complaining if they broke the standard and implemented their own "Epub 2.5"

What HarryT is saying is simply this:

What is the difference between implementing only a subset of features of EPUB3 and calling it .epub, and what Apple did, which was IMPLEMENT ONLY A SUBSET OF FEATURES OF EPUB3, and calling it .ibook?

[Sil_liS]

Originally Posted by Redcard

What SLIS asked was, if they don't want to read EPUB3 books fully, but instead focus on a subset, why not just write a reader that reads EPUB3 books but only supports the subset.

Not exactly. This isn't about reading books but about writing them. It's not like there are thousands of epub3 books out there waiting for a reader.

Originally Posted by Redcard

The problem with that logic is, according to the EPUB3 specifications, you must do all or nothing.

And those specifications were written in part by Apple.

Originally Posted by Redcard

People would be equally complaining if they broke the standard and implemented their own "Epub 2.5"

Why isn't there an epub2.5 standard? They started working on epub3 almost 2 years ago. I would ask why none of them figured out that epub3 was too much to handle, but some obviously did (hint, hint, it was Apple).

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Redcard

What is the difference between implementing only a subset of features of EPUB3 and calling it .epub, and what Apple did, which was IMPLEMENT ONLY A SUBSET OF FEATURES OF EPUB3, and calling it .ibook?

But that is not what they did. They introduced new things that is not in ePub3. So the choice was to implement a subset (with the plan to extend the support) and not call it ePub3 or invent their own parts of the language.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by tompe

But that is not what they did. They introduced new things that is not in ePub3. So the choice was to implement a subset (with the plan to extend the support) and not kall it ePub3 or invent their own parts of the language.

That's right. ePub 3, for example, does "programmability" using Javascript. A ".iBook" file does it using using a custom Apple scripting language.

[CommonReader]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Or outrun the competition. (just dont call their products standards; the misuse of the term is part of what is at issue.)

Bear in mind that there is no law of man or nature that forbids proprietary solutions. Historically, proprietary solutions are faster to ramp up, more agile in responding to market needs, and (obviously) more consistent.

Companies can be forced to do a lot of things when they are being found guilty of abusing a dominant market position. This includes forcing them to license their solutions right up to breaking up the company. The public is entirely justified to defend an open market against companies that use their dominance to lock competitors out.

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Apple itself said it best just this week;

“We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/bu...pagewanted=all

Substitute "epub" for "america" and their position is clear.

I am sure that this sentiment of "we don't care about society, we only care about our profit" can also be subscribed by Russian oligarchs and narco traffickers. Apple has outgrown the size that made such an attitude inconsequential. Perhaps some companies need to be reminded that society can exist without them, but they cannot exist without society.

Do people recall the time when the audio CD was introduced? A single standard, hardware made by many companies, available everywhere. That's an ideal way to introduce a new technology.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by CommonReader

Do people recall the time when the audio CD was introduced? A single standard, hardware made by many companies, available everywhere. That's an ideal way to introduce a new technology.

With compatibility being compromised by DRM:

The Red Book audio specification, except for a simple 'anti-copy' bit in the subcode, does not include any copy protection mechanism. Starting in early 2002, attempts were made by record companies to market "copy-protected" non-standard Compact Discs, which cannot be ripped, or copied, to hard drives or easily converted to MP3s. One major drawback to these copy-protected discs is that most will not play on either computer CD-ROM drives, or some standalone CD players that use CD-ROM mechanisms. Philips has stated that such discs are not permitted to bear the trademarked Compact Disc Digital Audio logo because they violate the Red Book specifications. Numerous copy-protection systems have been countered by readily available, often free, software.

[Katsunami]

And then, one of my friends dropped most of his teeth onto the floor when I still copied such a disc using the very oldest technique: a line-out cable from the CD-player, plugged into the line-in jack of a CD Recorder. (One that actually even created seperate tracks while recording.)

[CommonReader]

Originally Posted by murraypaul

With compatibility being compromised by DRM:

The first audio CD was released in 1982. The DRM versions came two decades later and were quite successfully suppressed by Philips.