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eBooks
Are Ready for Prime Time
The
Fight for eBook Standards
 vs.
using
information from The Industry
Standard, July 31, 2000
A
battle may be looming (a la Betamax vs. VHS) in setting the standard
for electronic distribution among OeB (Open eBook), favored by
Gemstar and Microsoft, and PDF (Adobe’s proprietary design for
electronic document delivery).
The
big-name authors Stephen King and James Ellroy made the news this
summer with the sale of digital rights to their works.
In September, Thomson Electronics announced the latest
electronic gadget for reading the material.
But,
behind the scenes the battle for how the electronic books will be
formatted, distributed and displayed is still being played out.
The
two contending formatting standards have three standard bearers. In
one corner is Adobe with its proprietary PDF technology.
(Adobe is also offering
a security standard for the digital rights management of eBbooks,
EBX—Electronic Book Exchange.)
On the opposite side are
Microsoft and Gemstar (which owns the eBook reader companies
Softbook and NuvoMedia, the producer of Rocket eBook).
They are the champions
of OeB, the non-proprietary offering, and among the 61 principal
members of the OeB Forum, which includes McGraw-Hill, Random House,
Palm, Nokia, and IBM.
(A comparison of
existing PDF and OeB features is offered in the table below.)
“The
name of the game is to be able to take content and repurpose it into
anything,” says David Ornstein, the OeB Forum president.
The OeB-format allows
text and images to reflow and fit any screen, ranging from a desktop
system with a 20-in. monitor to a five-line display for a smartphone.
 Now,
PDF eBooks are designed much like paper books—words and pictures
on the page are fixed in place.
However, a new version of the PDF specification is in the
works. It is said to
allow text and images to reflow to accommodate different devices,
and working prototypes of PDF readers for the Palm OS and Windows CE
devices have been developed. Also,
a Linux-based color device that will display PDF was announced by
Everybook, earlier this year.
The
Glassbook Reader
This
eBook reader company, Glassbook,
was
bought by Adobe in August.
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Comparing
the features of PDF and OeB
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Feature
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PDF
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OeB
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Open
specifications
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Yes
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Yes
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Proprietary
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Yes
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No
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Layout
separate from content
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No
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Yes
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Dedicated
devices available now
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No
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Yes
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Built-in
digital-rights management
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Yes
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No
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Based
on XML
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No
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Yes
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Text,
graphics, fonts in one file
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Yes
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No
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Scales
to fit screen size
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No
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Yes
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(Source:
Adobe and OeB)
For
related information on eBooks, see:
“Print
Books Are an Endangered Species”
How
authors are handling the digital divide
Education
is leading the way with eBooks
Just
like MTV, teen market wants its eBooks
…And,
so do retirees
But
will people buy them?
<<previous Focus
on eBooks next>>
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CIDM Best Practices Conference
Vasont Users' Group Meeting
Internet Librarian Conference
Journal Article Tag Suite Conference (JATS-Con)
SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting