Maybe Microsoft could have a Huge Role in Publishing?

The news that the lumbering giant Microsoft has once again entered the ebook world raised eyebrows, created much chatter and was certainly welcome at Barnes and Noble and especially with their investors. Leaving aside the obvious college and educational opportunities and their need to get back onto the mobile saddle and create something with their Nokia alliance, what could Microsoft do that would really make a difference and give them pole position in the hearts and minds of those in the digital world? The iPhone and iPad have catapulted Apple to the premier device position, Android has made Google more than just a search engine and Chrome has grown in the browser world. Microsoft must act or be relegated to playing in the lower divisions.

We thought about many angles, but the one which screams out to us is to their ability to leverage their dominant position in the ‘office’ product area. This could also defend it against the increasing ‘open source’ world pretenders and take it to a new level of ‘must have’.  Today Word, Excel, Powerpoint remain the de facto office and home document creation applications. However, they remain wedded to the past and exposed in the future. In reality, they haven’t developed significantly for over a decade and are in desperate need of more than a lick of paint.

So what would we do if we were Microsoft? Obviously they will do their best to be a white knight to publishing against the forces of evil but can the do much more? How would we secure their future? What would be the lead strategy that would pull-through other ‘publishing benefits? Simply competing on the OS platform isn’t going to do it. Lining up with Barnes and Noble is like going to support a mid table team – they may make it, they may win some games, but they are unlikely to dominate through Microsoft support alone. Nokia is a great partner, with a strong history of achievement, but they too are desperately looking for partners to shore up their future and have also made some bad calls over OS platforms which have cost them dear.

Our approach would be a return to the basics and play to their strengths. This would recognise that everyone today wants to express themselves and have a voice. If Office were to be able to output word documents in epub compliant tagged format to an open XML rich schema - that could make a difference. If it also offered content output rendered to HTML5,that too could make a difference. If it could ingest current word based documents and render them to ePub or HTML5 that could make a difference. If it offered collaborative editing at a premium within an XML construct that could make a difference. If the schemas were open and also able to be expanded and adapted that too could make a difference.

This would not negate Adobe’s role in complex constructs but would enable the feeds and the vast majority of works to circumvent conversion effort and be immediately publishable. It would enable the authoring and ultimately reading and it will engage a wide audience. Now take one step further and ensure any document that is exported is correctly rights tagged along with any inserted documents, pictures, audio, tables etc and we could be talking about the democratisation of publishing fro the author to the reader.

Some may say that we are dreaming but I bet we aren’t the only ones…

Ten Digital Reflections

If we look back over the decade of the ‘noughties’ we see ten technology/service step changes which have all in their own way enabled publishing to be digital. They may have not been the first to market, but were first to get it right and change things.

iPhone: The iPhone redefined the mobile, the user interface, the operating system, the application, the look and feel and much more. It combined the best of the iPod and iTouch and brought them to a smartphone. It made reading on a phone acceptable and was adopted by young and old.

Amazon Kindle: It started out as just another eInk device and ended up a multi device platform, leaving many so called pretenders in its wake. The single focus Amazon applied and their determination to evolve and protect their customers investment in Amazon, was what ultimately swept the others behind them.

YouTube: Youtube did for film what iTunes did for music. It became the enabler, the changer, the vehicle that promoted us from video watchers, to video makers. It gave the masses a common platform to express themselves and view alternatives. It was and is a 'starmaker'.

epub: As a standard it unified the industry and effectively became a 'category killer'. It is far from perfect today. Many see it not one standard, but as a mere container, with many issues and variations. However it effectively killed off Mobibook, MS Reader and nullified Adobe ebook. It enabled everyone to believe we had a single standard.

Widgets: They may have been overly engineered by some and lacked a common specification, but they started to make everyone think outside the box. Context started to be used to promote and sell content. We started to use the jacket as a container for content, metadata, bibliographic record and even to be a two way communication vehicle. Unfortunately, widgets were often not understood, lacked industry standards and leadership and remain waiting to be fully discovered.

Facebook: Many will ask why Faccebook? Why not MySpace, Bebo, or even those many publishing only pretend social networks? Facebook wasn’t the best social network, but it was the one that was adopted and accepted by all. It may have started as a narrow college vertical, but it then became inclusive of all and it was this that ultimately separated it from the rest. Why do we need book social networks such as Copia or BookRabbit when we have Facebook that can include all book social connections?

ACS4: When Adobe killed off ACS3 and embraced epub under the intial Adept service many industry players said 'no way'. Adobe quickly adapted it to what is now ACS4 and it soon became the DRM service across multiple devices. Love or hate DRM, it is here today and Adobe continues to be the glue that secures epub and Aebooks (PDF) on many devices. It offers the reader the ability to buy from a wide range of resellers and read files on a wide range of readers. It offers the author and publisher the security.

The Blog: We now have social networks, twitter and a host of ways to express and share our views. Some would suggest that the blog post has had its day and that the 'real time' snippet and interaction of Tweets is more powerful. Others would suggests that 140 characters says little and merely reflects our growing sound bite culture. Whatever, blogs were the vehicle that redefined journalism and writing and enabled many to be able to express themselves to a wider audience.

The Google Book Settlement: We all have an opinion on this audacious attempt to highjack an industry for little more than chump change. It sits still on the shelve awaiting judgement, but it has single handily woken everyone up to the issues facing copyright in the digital age, the challenges of orphan works, the nonsense of territorial rights in global digital economy and the fact that as a rights business, publishing stands exposed without even a basic rights registry.

Lightening Source: LSI came of age during the decade. It quickly became the aggregator and distributor of print on demand titles. First exploited by academia and smaller niche publishers, it has now grown into a vehicle to maintain back lists, produce short print runs and enable ‘lost works’ to be brought back into print. Interestingly it also enabled Ingram to quickly grow its digital offer.

Some may ask why we did not include Android, OLPC or even the iPad. The answer is a difficult one in that they all have had a dramatic impact on the market, but we feel that they and others still to offer or consolidate a step change.

What are your top ten and have we missed the obvious?

Is ePub, ePub or ePub?

We are only just really starting to get into the interoperable digital world we all seek but already cracks are surfacing and more importantly it is not difficult to envisage some further issues moving forward. Unfortunately we are not all experts in the detail, nor are many experts across the full range of issues and technologies and most importantly the experts often miss the commercial and cultural aspects in their search for technical utopia.

Yesterday I was sitting in our Pune office in India when I received an email which I am not saying is right or wrong only that the author is someone who I respect when it comes to digital file manipulation. His objective was to highlight that ePUB for iPad is different from ePUB for ADE and SonyReader and raise some areas for consideration. The mail was quiet detailed and extensive so I have just listed some of the issues raised.

1. The ePUB for the iPad needs a new-standard CSS for iPad-ePUB which will generically apply colour for Part/Chapter/Sections/Noteboxes/CodeListing and others. Fairly straightforward but not required until colour was delivered.
2. Image/Graphic format: iPad-ePUB supports JPG and PNG formats, but PNG (transparent) is recommended. Transparency of images helps’ if a coloured Notebox has an inline equation then image will not render white-patch of inline equation image.
3.The graphic dimension requirement is different for as images which occupy 25% or 40% of the page need more scaling as compared to Sony/ADE. This applies to cover dimension too.
3. Special Character support is extensive for iPad-ePUB as compared to ADE and SonyReader. This means that the iPad can render more characters as text as opposed to image.
5. iPad-ePUB does not work on XSL-stylesheet as ADE and SonyReader does. iPad-ePUB entirely works on CSS.

Although iPad-ePUB can be viewed on ADE but will not display colour enhancements in SonyReader (because of its grey screen). We can’t assure 100% cross-compatibility of ePUB between iPad and ADE/Sony, as the owner of respective specifications also don’t claim this cross-compatibility.

We already have DRM diversion as Apple, Amazon and Adobe go their separate ways. We still have multiple format s with Amazon, Blio, epub, Apple epub, Adobe ebook and obviously these will develop different versions and be open to different interpretations.

What we need to remember is that its not just the consumer that is faced with the question of interoperability but also the publisher and aggregator who has to hold and maintain them. Someone who invested early in digital files may now have to revisit these in order tomake them comply with the new demands. The recent change from 1.03 to 1.05 version of epub is a classic example of such a change.

The one thing we all want is interoperability.

eInk Just Lost its Cool, While eBook Issues Just Got Hotter

Cooler reader looks to be another casualty of the squeeze that is inevitable in the ‘lookie likie’ eink reader market. They follow iRex in what may be a growing queue of dead technology failures. The one consistent thing we have said is that this technology made little sense and had a very limited life and now the writing may be clearly on the wall.We doubt we will see eink readers as we know them today in 2012.

The cooler reader entered the market in a full colour with a spectrum of cases, but forgot to make the screen colour too. They also misjudged their launch with a stand and presentation more geared to a car show than a book show and their one trick pony was just a colour case. According to various sources they are no more.

Cooler will not be the last and there will be a lot more casualties before some sense prevails and we haven’t yet seen the inevitable price drop to minus $100 which will sort out many that are merely hanging around on death row today. As we said earlier this week the ones with strong content revenues and offer are the only ones with a survival chance today.

The Amazon Kindle however continues to push forward and now has a fancy graphite case. Surprisingly they have just discovered that a dark contrast makes a ‘white’ screen look like paper! Hello did they not realise this when Adobe created Digital Editions some four years ago. A graphite case and better eink resolution isn’t going to save what is basically inferior technology. You don’t see people going out to buy black and white TVs today so why expect them to buy black and white readers? The only stay of execution will be a drop to $99 a unit.

However the demise of black and white eInk has another interesting twist as it starts to potentially fracture Adobe’s DRM platform ACS4 which today was more or less the universal DRM across the eink devices. It also starts to highlight the differences between the adoption rules being applied to epub standards and formats in general.
There are a number of interesting issues now emerging on epub, hard DRM, soft DRM (watermarking) and readers. It will be interesting to watch as these unfold and what is certain is that there will not be one universal solution to these issues for some time yet.

The ABA's Digital Move Makes BookSense

When we wrote the Brave New World report some 3 years ago we clearly saw the glass as half full for the bookseller. It was clear that what was required was a way of supplying and servicing the channel. However, many publishers wanted digital to be direct, aggregators wanted to control the files and build up their own market, chains wanted to go alone and manufacturers saw an opportunity to lock in their devices.

The news that the American Booksellers Association, have adopted Adobe's Content Server 4 (ACS4) digital rights management server architecture to serve files to customers of their member bookstores, not only makes true Booksense, it is what we envisaged 3 years ago, It is the logic that underpins the Gardner Books Digital Warehouse and is being adopted by other wholesalers and distributors in many countries.

The news that Sony is in involved is in fact more noise. ACS4 is agnostic not exclusive and is fully supported by an increasing number of ebook devices, also support secure Adobe ebooks (PDF) and the only exception to this common ground is the Kindle.
So we are now seeing a significant shift with the major opposition to Amazon not being Sony, iRex, Cooler, Plastic Logic, BeBook but the file server that joins them together - Adobe’s ACS4.How will resellers react to the opportunity that now clearly enables them to participate? Will consumer buy local or from the chain, or from the aggregators? Will publishers commercially enable the current channel to fully participate, or back the ‘stack them high and sell them cheap’ merchants?

Today it is hard to envisage an alternative to ACS4 and once it’s SDK option is taken up by mobile players, we will start to see a level of interoperability sought by many. This is a bold step by the ABA and as long as we steer clear of the false repository wars, we may now see a significant digital step change that is makes it possible for all to partisipate.

A Year is a Long Time in Today’s Technology World

We now see the inevitable division of content delivery focus, with Google going for the online reading route, others sticking to the offline reading route and Amazon probably trying to cover every conceivable option.

We are already in the device battles with eInk versus the rest. Mobiles versus ereaders and ereaders versus netbooks, laptops etc. We are just starting to see the app battles with Apple versus Andriod, versus Blackberry, versus Symbian versus Microsoft. What is certain is that whatever device you use today it will not be the device you will use, or want to use, in a couple of years.

So where would we place our bets today?

Will the ereaders survive as a one dimensional product, or will we look back fondly at them in a few years time as some quaint Delorean car, a great looking prototype that had to evolve. We hear lots about colour eInk but the demand is today not necessarily tomorrow. What is clear, is that we will see many more eink ‘lookie likies’ some merely rebadged, some exclusive, some heavily financed and some not. The price today is too high, the technology to restrictive and the concept of carrying a library around with you at all time ludicrous in the extreme. Only when we view this technology as throwaway and transient commodity will it change its appeal. This can happen as a result of adoption by a WalMart, Tesco etc or like MP3 it just becomes cheap commodity.

We also still have formats to sort out. Many may man the barricades and demand an epub world as others before them demanded an SGML or an OEB world. The truth is today the best format for most will remain the PDF in the Adobe eBook form, which contrary to popular urban myth works perfectly well on devices such as the Sony Reader. Many feared that reflow was essential and that epub gave us the answer, that the reality is now different. Don’t get us wrong we welcome epub, but it no longer is this issue as times move on.

Will DRM (Digital Rights Management) still be with us in say three years time and if so how will it work is another interesting challenge? We have seen only one aggregator switch to-date, but it gave us an insight to a potential risk. Technology may be replicable moving forward but the encrypted licences needed may be dependant on the original server or service being in place or under contract. Adobe have started to minimise this exposure but it still exists for many who have not opted for a neutral licence service. Watermarking has still to make its mark, but will it coexist with DRM, replace it, or be a nice to have?

We believe the biggest technology choice remains online versus offline. Google have clearly placed their bets online while may others scramble around trying to develop to perfect offline experience. There is no reason why eink should work with online. The issue is the mindset that says we have to own a library and we need to carry it around with us just in case we want to read another book! Is the book market the only one facing this question? We only need to look at Spotify and music, TV and the iPlayer and Hulu, games and even news and magazines. What and how we consume on the move is different to what and how we consume when not on the move. We access and use media and information differently according to the role we are playing at the time and what we want from it and yet we appear to be wanting to shoehorn a one size fits all technology approach into the market.

The one thing that is certain about tomorrow is that it will be different to today.

Amazon Take Off their eBook Format Gloves

Publishers Weekly today announced that Amazon.com has notified its publisher and author clients that it plans to cease offering e-books in the Microsoft Reader and Adobe e-book formats.

What does this mean? Is it like their declaration that they made on POD via Booksurge? As with Booksurge Amazon own Mobibook and if that’s they way they wish to do business then who will say no?. They store, they have the content, they deliver the content via their own wireless network connection, they own the store, they own the reader - so why not own the format? Although they accept epub files these are converted these to their own format. Some may say that by playing the format card they in fact strengthen their hand and make it Kindle independent. So the publisher may be happy but the problem remains.

Mobibook remains probably the dominant ebook format alongside Adobe and epub. If plays on as many as any other format and isn't dependant on Adobe to apply DRM. So if you view Sony as the main competitor to Amazon then you start to see a clear division of ebook camps. Adobe remains in the picture with their new ACS4 DRM, without which the Sony can’t use epub and are left with their own overlooked format and poorly represented format. We have reported on the Fictionwise and Follett ‘own brand’ formats and can only see more as the battle hots up.

Some may envisage that Amazon and Mobi will try to cut off old DRM versions the same way that Adobe did in their move from ACS3 to ACS4. Some may also see the move as a swift response to the high profile ereader format and iPhone applications. Whatever the game plan its obvious that Amazon wants to challenge the Adobe ebook format which is the cheapest route for many publishers and push the market towards a richer tagged format.

This format warring is inappropriate as retailers and publishers start to see the shoots of a digital business. However, we now have a confusing consumer offer. The publishers may back epub but the consumer is the person who matters and if Amazon want an Amazon only world we are in for potentially trying times.

We still believe that the ultimate platforms will be online and split between the mobile and the notebook /laptop world and if we are right the current format tiffs are not so important.

The Mobile Noise Versus The Mobile News

The smartphone world has started to become the latest ‘in’ place and we are starting to see the explosion of mobile applications. We have long believed that this and the notebook/laptop platforms are the main technology platforms for the immediate future and that all other, unless they have a compelling case, all will migrate to these two platforms. Mobile offers much but also is very restricted today in the size of the display, application and files supported and the yet to be resolved, device/ carrier/ operating system wars.

Single application devices such as the ebook readers are going to have a hard fight to justify their existence against what appears to be an inevitable outcome. PDF requires reflowable text in order to work on mobiles and although this is possible it is crude today. However, epub offers full reflow and therefore the ability to render automatically onto mobiles. Some would argue that Adobe backed the epub ebook standard in an attempt to ‘own’ the mobile world through its ACS4 DRM service.
Some would also point out that Adobe is ‘spreading their bet’ by their push to get Flash onto the mobile platform. The issue here is size and the need to used Flash Lite or as we have reported move the flash application onto the chip and thereby maximize efficiency and also virtually guarantee flash on all devices – even the iPhone who currently are holding out against Flash.

Today there are many applications which will play files on mobiles. Some use proprietary formats and introduce further conversion or restrictions. Some come with no effective DRM and although fine for public domain titles are not suitable for front list. We then have widgets which have in the main have been Flash driven so need to be revisited to present the information in a digestible form. Finally we have the content itself and the question of what the consumer will want to read on a mobile device.

We will read much over the coming months on publishers, and mobiles and many claims much of which will be noise and positioning rhetoric. What is important is that we are able to identify the genuine news and progress from the PR spin and noise that currently engulfs this area.

Mobile eBook Reader?

When Apple opens its store on Friday and Steve Jobs launches the new iPhone, the impact is likely to be as significant at last time, but the difference this time, is that its not so much the phone, but what you can do with it.

The new 3G phone has been effectively unlocked to enable more than 500 developers to create new applications and download others. The technology market has harnessed applications to drive demand before. Remember the IBM PC powered by Microsoft Window and more applications than the Mac. Remember the IBM and HP and DEC mid range periods of dominance all driven by software applications.

The availability of rich software could help tip the market further towards iPhone. However the gulf they have to breach is not small with Palming claim to have some 30,000 active software developers and Microsoft more than 18,000 applications available for its Windows Mobile operating system. 25% of the initial Apple applications will be free and 33% will be games. Of the commercial applications some 90% will be sold for $9.99. Apple would provide distribution and marketing.

Many have said that if Apple were to create an ebook reader then the market would take off. Others have agreed that the content and it packaging would need to change also to fit the mobile demands. What is clear is that the mobile applications market is hoting and opening up and it may not be Apple who now has to create that magic connection. Interestingly it is not rocket science to understand that the reason that Adobe back the epub standard so heavily and developed the only DRM to support it today was to have re-flow text that can be rendered on the mobile platform.

Perhaps things a closer than we all imagine.

'Open' or 'Closed' Depends on Where You Stand

Today we read the trade press and of much noise about open formats. Some would argue that defining ‘open’ is often hard and they would question whether a format by itself can ever be open without an open Digital Rights management and an open reader platform. Of course we would all love just one way of doing business, one way to hold a file, one universal file we can play anywhere and that no matter what device the file is loaded onto it will be able to read it and render it for all to see.

Then we hit the reality check.

Manufactures develop their own way of doing things for obvious reason. Industry bodies may adopt and or adapt these or start again with their own standards. However, the nature of all standards are that they are a framework, a common way of describing things and actions, and that there will always be options that are always exercised.

There are three elements to consider when we talk about ebook downloads; the format, the DRM and the reader.

Today we have a number of downloadable formats; Adobe ebook, Microsoft Reader, Mobibook the emerging ePub and others. Software developer Adobe has thrown its weight behind the IDPF and the epub format with its ADEPT service. What differentiates these from say a PDF, HTML or a word document is that they are constructed to work as a book or large document and have an associated digital rights management that can encrypt and enable the files to be securely transferred between platforms. However some may argue that these formats are more restrictive than XML and similar formats such as HTML, Plucker, PDF and others.

This new epub format came from the IDPF industry body and the same stable that gave us the OEB format. The epub format differs in that although it is an ‘open’ format today it does not have an ‘open’ DRM. If the DRM was open then anyone could effectively bypass it and effectively defeat the whole objective but when DRM is through one route then surely it is no longer 'open'. epub may well be adopted by a number of major players who in turn will develop their own DRM wrap. Does that mean the format is not ‘open’ – no. It merely means that the native file is open but the route to market is not.

Next we have the readers; Kindle, Sony, iRex and many more. We have seen the rise and fall of many readers over a relatively short period and will probably see more of the same in the future as the market starts to develop. Each has its associated format capabilities; Kindle and iRex the Mobibook and Sony BBEB or now epub with Adobe being rendered on a wide range of devices. The issue is that a mobi file will not be playable on a Sony device and potentially a epub file bought for a Sony device will not be playable on a Kindle, or currently on a iRex or a Palm or any other device today. When we get down to ebooks on mobiles the debate currently gets much murkier. Here the capability to free the pages and reflow them is seen as essentail and fixed page formats will not succeed.

The real problem is that consumers are confronted by conflicting formats and what could be best described as a DRM land grab from publishing and technology companies. Dr Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg is reprted in an article in PC Pro last year stating, "Fundamentally, eBooks are files, and having the file locked to a particular device or software that only runs on a particular device, or some other sort of protection or encoding, is unfriendly to readers."

We can’t comment on some of the conclusions drawn by some commentators but we can understand the term ‘land grab’ but believe that the PC Pro article, even though its out of date now, is worth a read and speaks frankly and openly about some of the relationships that are dictating today's landscape.

Is there such a thing as Standard?

Standards have always been open to variation. Going right back to our days with ecommerce EDI, tradacoms and later the EDIFACT standards often differed between trading partners. The basic schema and semantics were the same but the actual interpretation and use of individual fields could vary. We all adapted and built or used front end conversion services that could normalise the data.

When we moved into the digital content world, we all understood format wars were a necessary evil and often wished them away. They often fed consumer apathy and indecisiveness. After all we have all bought technology that soon became obsolete. We remember the old 8 track, the Sony Walkman, we lived through betamax versus VHS wars and much more. Often one standard or format dominated but the logic as to which was going to win was not always done to the best technology or the best format but down to factors often outside of these.

We now have print on demand services which are now becoming pivotal to certain publishing programmes such as vanity publishing, short cycle print runs and academic. So is one print on demand file the same as another? Can you take a file created for one service and automatically use it on another? Unfortunately not, but the differences although often minimal are still a change. Files created for one service are not truly generic.

Today we have digital books that can be formatted in several different ways; Microsoft Reader, Mobibook, Adobe ebook, etc. We have added digital rights management encryption that can be applied to protect the content and have a myriad of devices that can render the files. So what happens with open formats such as OEB and epub? Well the reality is that they are often both open and proprietary. There are exceptions and the most well know of these is MP3. Not the best format technically but one that is able to be played on almost any device and through a vast number of software players. The fact that makes this possible is lack of DRM on MP3.

OEB (Open Ebook) has long been used by many as an open digital standard. Are all OEB files the same? No, and many aggregators have their own interpretation. Its derivative epub is now being heralded by many as the new dawn and a truly open standard, but today there is only one DRM service that can encrypt it and only one player that can render the encrypted download. Will others follow – almost certainly? Will they be the same in their encryption and rendering requirements - almost certainly not.

iTunes built an empire on the service, the player and a proprietary format. Audible has built an empire on a proprietary format and DRM operability on many players. Both are now seen to have helped open up the market but also restricted it.

Today we have Mobi and Amazon and epub and Sony. Sony appear to have dropped their previous proprietary format and see epub as a more acceptable industry way forward. Adobe’s PDF based ebook reader is still a major force and will be dominant in the market but as we shift towards the mobile device market then the ability to reflow text and chunk files would indicate that the tagging formats of Mobi and epub will come to the front. However, DRM remains the key to the downloadable file world and the mobile platform the real battleground.