E-books outselling paper books at Amazon

The ebook industry is currently going through the same growing pains the MP3 industry went though several years ago. I'm not against ebooks at all. I already have a reader, with tons of books on it. All of my titles, however, are open source, and can be legally obtained completely free of DRM from several websites. I've got enough to keep me occupied until the ebook industry catches up.



MP3 services used to be loaded with DRM, and I never gave them a penny. Now I can drop by any number of MP3 online services and buy music 100% DRM free, and I've spent hundreds.

Ebook services are currently loaded with DRM, and I never give them a penny. Once I can drop by any number of ebook online services and buy books 100% DRM free, I'll likely spend thousands.

Well, e-books also have a problem that mp3s never did, and that is format. Mp3 services pretty much sell them in mp3 format because that will play on any player. With the noticible exception of iTunes, but that's Apple doing a Sony and thinking their format is so superior to anything else. Still, conversion software is abundant.
E-books, on the other hand come in apparently 28 different formats. And most readers out there only support perhaps 3 of those formats. And each format has its own way to encrypt with DRM. It's a mess, and at the moment there's nobody selling them talking to anybody else that's selling them about any form of compatability. Luckily, there's Calibre and some wonderful plug-ins that can solve the problems for a person.

Yeah, formats of e-books, and the proprietary-ness of them are one of the biggest problems right now.

Every reader out there will read .txt documents and with very few exceptions PDF format as well. The problem with .txt is that it is just that, text. No way to bold or italicize any text. And being able to do those two things is actually quite important for stories because it lets the reader know when to emphasize things. Take for instance the following example: “You don’t deliver? Am I hearing you correctly…?” versus “You don’t deliver? Am I hearing you correctly…?” One can clearly tell in the second set of sentences just how irritated this person is, while in the former sentences one cannot. One has to run the first set of sentences through one’s mind several times, each time getting a different level of irritation, depending on which words one puts the emphasis on. But with the latter set, the author has clearly shown which is the way he wanted it to be read.

PDF format does a great job of making a e-book look like a book, no matter what screen you open the file on. However this is also it’s great downfall. PDF doesn’t scale well, and if the publisher went to the trouble of making the PDF of, say, Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters, look exactly like the print version, we have page numbers and headings and whatnot on every page. That looks very nice on a computer screen, and perhaps also on a 9” e-reader, but on anything smaller, the text of the book becomes very small. If a person adjusts the text size for better reading, we clearly see the downside of PFD, as the page numbers and heading (title and author on top of every page) get thrown into the rest of the text at strange places. PDF also doesn’t word-wrap correctly, if at all, so sentences which would be on a new line get thrown onto the same line as sentences which come before them. This can make conversations a bit hard to follow. And then theres the fact that when a person adjusts the text size of a PDF on a reader, pages can break at strange places. Since the PDF has defined pages, you might get a screen with only two lines at the top of a screen, while the next page fills the screen fully – but with the header and page number at the top.

.RTF files seem to be the easiest and best way to go. At least as far as having Calibre convert to other formats. RTF lets a person indent at paragraph beginnings, bold, italicize, change font size and all of that. And they convert nicely. However, very few e-readers can actually read this format, so having a converter is essential.

Word files are a bit trickier. Since MS changed the format of Word files in 2007 from .doc to .docx, pulling them up on a reader can be a bit tricky. While Word files have the same advantages of RTF files with word-wrapping, indenting, and such, there’s also not as many converters for these files.

Truly, the e-pub file seems to be the format that is slowly pulling ahead of other file formats. It has support for images, tables, sound, interactivity, word-wrap, embedded annotation, bookmarking, and is an open standard.
With the exception of the Kindle, every actual e-reader can view e-pub files, some only unDRMed and some with DRM, depending on the DRM.

However, the few formats that the Kindle can view (.mobi, .prc, .txt, .ptz and .azw) are easily convertible to other formats. And the .azw format is actually based on .mobi wrapped in Amazon’s DRM. The Mobipocket format (which Amazon bought in 2005) is based on the Open eBook standard, of which .epub is the evolution. So, in many ways the Kindle books are slightly different .epub books, which makes them easily convertible.

Barnes & Nobles’ Nook uses the .pbd format and appears to be the only device to do so. Fortunately, the Nook also reads e-pub and PDF files, with or without DRM (but only one version of DRM).

Borders seems to have thrown most of their support behind the Kobo brand e-reader. The Kobo reader supports epub and PDF files for e-books. However, the Kobo seems to be having problems of its own.

But with the plethora of formats, and the e-book hardware makers propensity to make another format just for their machine, consumers have little choice but to either do a lot of research before buying one, or make a choice of hardware and try to stick with it. At the moment the two giants in the industry, B&N and Amazon, have readers and choices that seem to be working for them and many consumers. Sony and Borders also have seem to have solutions for themselves, though they seem to have a few more problems.

When doing research for my e-reader purchase last year, I almost went with a BeBook product because it would read the most formats of books. However, being a company based in the Netherlands, support for the BeBook wasn’t what I would like it to be, and the price was a bit much. I finally went with the Sony PRS-650. A nice touch screen, with a stylus for highlighting and note taking, and a product that I could find locally (and actually take back to a store for a refund if I disliked the product). I also liked that it supports the e-pub format, which is now my format of choice. E-pub files look wonderful on my Sony.

Finally, you probably noticed me mention e-book conversion up there several times. After choosing e-reader, I did some more research and found the Calibre software. I now no longer have to worry about where I buy my e-books. If Borders has a book on sale I want, versus Amazon or Barnes & Noble, I buy it from Borders. If only Barnes & Noble has a book I am looking for, I get it from them. I then run these books through Calibre and its plug-ins and the book can then be placed on my reader and read at my leisure. The Calibre software is a wonderful piece of programming and I highly recommend it.