Be kind to the Kindle, ebooks have a long way to go

Stuart Corner
Monday, 26 November 2007 07:32

Opinion and Analysis

Certainly it will become increasingly difficult as time passes to read electronic information created in present day formats for present day media (iPod included!) but it won't be impossible, and cost is likely to be in inverse proportion to popularity. It's a fair bet that in years to come your children and grand children will be able to view the photos and the movies you take of them today.

The e-book is in its infancy, there are several competing standards - booksonboad.com advertises 176,000 titles for the Microsoft Reader, twice as many as Amazon has for the Kindle. Amazon's ambition is reported to be "to have every printed book on earth available for instant download." That's a great idea, except that I don't like the idea of Amazon having a monopoly, and that goal would be much more achievable if there were a universal standard for e-publishing.

Different vendors would be able differentiate their devices with bells and whistles, but if anyone could can publish their content in this open standard and make it available to all at whatever price they chose then we would be much closer to realising this goal.

Of course there are already some such standards, like Adobe PDF, but they do not lend themselves to mimicking the paper book as easily as dedicated devices like the Kindle.

In fact Australian book retailer, Dymocks, has just launched an electronic book service. Unlike Kindles its ebooks come in a variety of software formats to run on multiple devices; Microsoft Reader, Mobipocket Reader an Adobe Reader.

Project Gutenberg, founded in 1971 aims to make the full texts of public domain books available electronically in long-lasting, open formats that can be used on almost any computer. Generally this means text of html. Thanks to Plucker, these can be converted into a format that can be read on a Palm PDA or smartphone.

In short, there are just two many formats and too much fragmentation. What is needed is one format, such as PDF, that can be read on almost any device including a small piece of hardware the emulates the traditional reading experience as closely as possible. Unfortunately we are a very long way from that.

Make no mistake about it, the ebook is here to stay. It has a long way to go but Kindle represents another big step along that road.