My way or the highway

Lately I’ve been reading a snowballing number of posts in the ebook community about adopting EPUB as the international (and pleasepleaseplease DRM-free) standard. This is great and I’m SOOO on board with that. What’s got me disturbed is that the subtext (and sometimes it’s not even that subtle) is that in order to adopt EPUB, publishers ought to ditch every other format, I assume, to force the issue of EPUB format adoption for everyone.

No fucking way!

Are you serious?

As a consumer and producer of ebooks, let me tell you, this is simple crackpot evangelism. EPUB is the future; I do not disagree and I would love to see it come into its own and beat the competition.

HOWEVER

The competition exists for a reason and that’s because there are competing machines out there. Why in the world wouldn’t a producer find and exploit every digital outlet he could while they exist?

Now, I understand it’s perfectly reasonable for a producer of analog music to give up making vinyl records and 8-track tapes when there are few enough record players and 8-track players that it makes no sense to spend the time to do so. But if there is fairly equal money in each format, it would be foolish for the producer to give up producing even one of those formats.

In short, there is no way we would give up any one of the (now) 10 digital formats we publish in unless and until all devices can and will read one format and that the majority of the users of those devices are choosing one format:

AZW (Kindle)

EPUB (any device using Stanza or Adobe Digital Editions)

HTML (a lot of devices, plus any browser)

IMP (eBookWise)

LIT (Microsoft Reader)

LRF (Sony PRS)

MOBI/PRC (any device using Mobipocket)

PDB (Palm)

PDF (any device that reads PDF), and coming soon,

iApp for the iTunes store (iPhone/iTouch)

The fact of the matter is that once you’ve formatted for one of the above, you’ve formatted for over half the rest with minor tweaks. Yeah, it takes time to make each pretty for its own device, but it’s worth it as long as people feel they’ve gotten their money’s worth.

And every single one of those formats has a serious issue or 3 that consumers don’t like. However, each consumer still has the choice of the format with the least number of annoyances for him. Giving me 1 format (or, in the case of a book I really really really wanted to buy) 4 formats that are pure hell on me isn’t going to get me to adopt those formats; it’s only going to jolt me out of my impulse buy and now that I’m not BUYING paper books anymore, I’ll get it at the library.

So, Hachette Book Group. Thanks for saving me some money, ’cause I wasn’t strong enough to withstand the temptation if it had been in a format I could use.

10 thoughts on “My way or the highway

  • December 1, 2008 at 11:19 am
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    .

    People are funny. Either you have to drag them into the future or they want to get there before it exists.

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  • December 1, 2008 at 1:18 pm
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    Just goofy. And Amazon is trying to do the same thing. Amazon tried to make a big power play with the kindle. Cause they’re Amazon. And in the process they have gotten greedy by only giving the publisher 35% of sales.

    Exactly what is Amazon doing here that is WORTH 65% of my sale price?

    Meanwhile Google is making their weird play for power in publishing with Google Book search. And I don’t care what the lawsuit says, that has “shifty” written all over it.

    Meanwhile the rest of the publishers are freaking out over what Borders will buy. Who cares? The fight just moved to the internet. Catch up.

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  • December 1, 2008 at 3:08 pm
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    Exactly what is Amazon doing here that is WORTH 65% of my sale price?

    Exposing you to a different audience, mostly neophyte, IMO, but exposure is good. I look at being on Amazon as a business expense, not a revenue stream.

    Meanwhile the rest of the publishers are freaking out over what Borders will buy. Who cares? The fight just moved to the internet. Catch up.

    *chuckle*

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  • December 1, 2008 at 6:27 pm
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    That’s true. Being on Amazon is a business expense. Except for print books. Then I think it’s a revenue stream. It still irritates me though. I think 50/50 would be fair, and I would still be paying for the exposure.

    I’m surprised larger publishers haven’t started bitching about it. I was listening to the dragon pages podcast the other night with Michael Stackpole, and they were talking about how Random House is lowering their ebook royalties for their authors from 50% to 25%.

    So maybe that’s how they’re dealing with the kindle issue. Just take some more out of the author’s pocket. Lovely.

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  • December 1, 2008 at 11:24 pm
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    I always thought that was the one reason the one format would probably take some time to work. I’m stuck with Mobi, for instance, because it’s the only format that would work on my phone. Although I love it when books are available in PDFs and HTML.

    And DRM. We can all rejoice the day that is done away with!

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  • December 2, 2008 at 10:22 am
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    This is not unprecedented, and is–hopefully–inevitable. The whole fight over Blu-Ray was to push industry-wide adoption of a single standard. Same with broadcast TV come February 17 (at least this won’t be legislated). As with VHS, it’s adapt or die.

    You bought a Betamax? You bought an HD-DVD player? Too bad. All that matters in the end are the specs for the readers. This is why an off-the-shelf DVD player will have a spec list like: CD CD-R CD-RW CD-Video DVD DVD+R DVD-R DVD+RW DVD-RW.

    Once a standard is established, especially when it comes to the compiled XHTML formats (most of them), software products like Mobipocket Creator and ReaderWorks should be able to tweak their code to crank out whatever format you want. The same way Open Office will read and write Word and a dozen other text formats.

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  • December 2, 2008 at 10:36 am
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    You bought a Betamax? You bought an HD-DVD player? Too bad. All that matters in the end are the specs for the readers. This is why an off-the-shelf DVD player will have a spec list like: CD CD-R CD-RW CD-Video DVD DVD+R DVD-R DVD+RW DVD-RW.

    I think right now the big difference is that publishers aren’t exactly champing at the bit to get their libraries digitized because of fear of piracy.

    Harlequin is, but they’re NOT on board with EPUB.

    Other publishers who also digitize offer inconsistent formats. The book I wanted in 4 formats that are useless to me offers its prequel in 5 formats, one of which is very useful to me. Same author, same series, same publisher–inconsistent output.

    It’d be one thing if you could count on X publisher putting out their digital offerings in A, B, C, and D formats always and consistently, then weaning toward whichever evolves as the industry standard. But you can’t even do that.

    There is no MP3 (with or without DRM) for ebooks and that’s what EPUB wants–NEEDS–to grow up to be. But the content producers seem to be digitizing with a gun at their back–as slowly and as inconveniently as possible to stem the tide. Until they get with it, nobody else can really make any claims toward progress.

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  • December 2, 2008 at 10:49 am
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    Hey MoJo, it’s like a half-hearted effort to digitize then: “See? Ebooks don’t sell.” Well not if you can’t be bothered to put it into enough formats so your readers can read it.

    But I agree with you that it’s largely a piracy fear. Downplay ebooks as not a viable sales channel to explain why you aren’t digitizing very much. Then when it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, pat yourself on the back for it.

    Notice how so many of them have JUMPED on the Kindle. Cause that’s all DRM’d and it’s proprietary TO the Kindle. They feel safer. Of course hopefully, the DRM thing is what will bite Kindle in the butt. I’m hoping it doesn’t ‘take off” too well.

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  • December 2, 2008 at 12:02 pm
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    I’m hoping it doesn’t ‘take off” too well.

    If Amazon doesn’t keep up Kindle production, I just don’t see how it can. They have a finite customer base at the moment that will stay at that number until they can get more units in stock.

    Reply
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