Is ePub the next step for e-Books?

by Frank Hedley  |  November 4, 2009

By now it’s a sure fact: the future of books is e-Books. So, no more piles of books to store and bulky books to carry around, all you need is a slim and elegant device which will hold your entire curricula, but when you’ll read it will feel like paper. E-Books were made popular by Amazon Kindle and now are conquering new grounds and new followers.

But, beneath the glossy gadget, stands out the software which does a great job transforming the digital book into a “feel like paper” experience. At this point, a new e-book standard has appeared on the market, ePub: a free and open format, developed by IDPF, designed especially for “reflowable” content. To shed some light into this matter, one needs to know that ePub allows text display optimization on every device that supports this format, its goal being to be accepted by every reading device on the market.

So, a format that is not locked to a specific hardware will be a great gain for consumers: he’ll buy the hardware of choice and then, he’ll have the freedom to choose from where to buy the e-books. On the other hand, for a company, such as Amazon, the ePub format is a great threat, meaning that it could break the desired monopoly Amazon wishes to impose on Kindle users, thus leading to financial losses. The only smart thing to do right now for Amazon would be to embrace the ePub format and hope that Kindle fans will remain Kindle fans.

But, not all around ePub sounds so peachy. For example, the new format will not be suitable for comic books or technical books, as they require a precise layout and advanced formatting, although there might be plans for future improvements once comic books companies will make the step towards e-prints devices. Regarding the problematic DRM (digital rights management) matter, the existence of ePub will nevertheless intervene in the publisher / distributor scheme, and force a choice on both parts. Publishers will strive for widespread coverage, distributors will opt for exclusive channels. Where do the users stand? (Also notice how more and more a reader is referred to as an user? Just to imply that books and creative works for that matter, are no longer stand alone projects, but interactive creations backed up by the electronic device era, thus turning a user into a participant. Which, in turn, leads to the idea that extensive copyright protection limits digital progress and the advance of a further in-depth user-device relation. Ok, closing now this big parenthesis.) We can only assume that, given the already partial failure of DRM for musical records, neither will proprietary ebooks succeed in maintaining monopolistic copy rights. As for assumptions of piracy, distributors will only have to think of more clever ways to reduce it than messing with people's rights.

For the companies which have already adopted the ePub format: Sony, Barnes & Noble and the giant Google, the success is said to be around the corner, but for Amazon the threat is not yet that big to accept the ePub compromise. So, is ePub the next step for e-Books? Many of us have the tendency to say “Yes”, but taking into account the fact that the e-readers market is still a young one, we’ll just have to wait and see both benefits and repercussions of the new e-book format.

Although the ePub standard has its limitations, it is hoped to bring an e-reader in every backpack, and in such a case it’s a win-win situation (consumers-producers). In a couple of days, more exactly on November 30, we’ll see the ePub format at work on the newest reader from Barnes & Noble: Nook. For more information don’t miss the article “A new e-reader comes to town: Nook”.

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