Why Is This Hill So Steep?

by Steve Jordan

  This is why it was the small publishers that made a splash in the arena first. Companies like MobiPocket, which backed its own format and application to go with the books it sold, and Fictionwise, which would sell books in multiple formats, developed web presences and started to make sales, while the Big Pub houses tried to reconcile themselves with the knowledge that most of the e-book stores’ content consisted of amateur and independent authors and small publishers, all of which were considered to be “substandard” by the majority of the public (thanks to Big Pub’s efforts), and would not last long.

  Interestingly enough, one of the earliest and most ubiquitous e-book formats isn’t considered by many to be an e-book format at all: Adobe’s Reader format (also known as Acrobat, or by its file extension, PDF) has been the dominant electronic document format since the 90s. However, the Acrobat format was primarily created to “lock in” a document’s layout, so that it could be moved from one computer to another, always look exactly the same on-screen, and always give the same result when printed. The format was quickly adopted by business users, egged on by the aggressive marketing strategy of Adobe, and has become a default document-sharing format for businesses worldwide. But although the format has undergone changes over the years, making it much more suitable for a variety of digital reading devices, it is considered too bloated and print-centric to be a “proper” e-book format, and is being bypassed in favor of simpler, more compact formats.

  Another potential format for e-books is HTML, the coding used to render web pages on a browser. A number of the various e-book formats are actually built on versions of HTML, or based on HTML coding. This would suggest that HTML, read on browsers optimized for e-books (as opposed to web pages), might be an ideal format for future e-books. However, this logic has somehow escaped those who have tried to develop the “perfect” e-book format, or it has been assumed by programmers, apparently too used to taking the hard way out of every easy situation, that HTML was not robust enough to present words and occasional graphics to a user.

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  Recent developments have greatly simplified, though not extinguished, the Format Wars and its collateral damage. Two of the developments are unified efforts to create a dominant format, but from differing perspectives, while the other development is being driven by a different sort of economy, and is even further behind than the commercial e-book market.

  The first development was the creation of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF.org). The IDPF set out to create a common e-book format that would satisfy the majority of e-book users… in essence, no different from previous efforts, with the exception that they hoped to create an “open-source,” or non-proprietary format that any other organization or individual could use. They planned to oversee the format, and vet and either authorize or veto any changes to it, to make sure the format remained easy to use, fully documented, and widely implementable. The format eventually introduced and recommended to the world is known as the Open E Book (OEB) format, now more popularly known by its file extension, ePub. The IDPF has openly and widely encouraged the use of the OEB format, and as its non-proprietary nature means no licensing is required to create documents, or use (or create) readers, it is garnering a lot of interest right out of the box. Today it is already well on its way to becoming the dominant, possibly even the default, international e-book reading format and platform.

  The second development was the entry into the e-book market of Amazon.com. When Amazon, already a powerful retailer, decided to move into the e-book field, it planned to take advantage of its established catalog of content and web-based selling infrastructure by manufacturing a reading device that would connect wirelessly to their catalog and allow fast and easy purchasing and downloading. Their device, called the Kindle, was widely anticipated, and strongly marketed by Amazon when it was introduced. It quickly became the dominant dedicated e-book reading device on the market, in no time becoming a default trade name almost as well-known as “Kleenex” or “Aspirin.” Amazon purchased Mobipocket, already considered one of the dominant e-book format platforms, to provide a format for the Kindle device, and Kindle’s popularity has extended MobiPocket format popularity appropriately. As the Kindle store grows, expect to see more content created in MobiPocket so it can be sold to Kindle users.

  The third development hasn’t exactly come out of left field, but it seems it was out there an awfully long time before making itself heard. The world of educational texts had repeatedly dipped its toes into the e-book waters since the 1990s. But if Big Pub had an established system in place that they were loath to break, educational Big Pub was even more deeply entrenched. Educational publishing, with its more narrow markets and tighter profit margins, its highly competitive nature and its need for greater accuracy in its product, could not conceive of making changes to their publishing machine to accommodate e-books, and held fast against them as long as they could.

  However, the recent downturn of the economy has put students and institutions in a financial bind, and the textbook industry is being forced to deal with a smaller, more demanding market. Publishers are now developing e-book versions of their texts, which has raised a new question: Are any of the existing formats well-suited for textbooks, with their extended cross-referencing layout, pictures and diagrams, etc? As some publishers are looking forward, and examining devices like the Kindle, others are returning to the venerable Adobe Acrobat format, based on a preponderance of legacy material already saved in the PDF format, and the fact that PDFs can be read on the computers and laptops that are becoming standard issue on college campuses.

  It is too early to say which format or formats will become truly dominant in the industry… or whether we may see a new format arrive and eclipse all the others in due time. The present uncertainty may be much less than it was, but it is still acting to slow the adoption of e-books into other markets and industries.

  3: Printing—The shotgun marriage of paper and computers

  Paper, of course, has had a special place in the business world since it was invented… which is to say, paper and business have been together for a long, long time. After all, business transactions need to be recorded somewhere: Before there was a way to record transactions, there was essentially no business beyond very basic trade. Recording transactions made business memory possible, and allowed more elaborate and far-reaching business to be conducted. Paper made those transactions easier to record than making impressions on clay tablets, and cheaper than making marks on skins, so it was instrumental in making business better.

  In the latter part of the twentieth century, paper was more important to business, and more encompassing than ever, thanks to the introduction of modern inventions designed to allow printing and reproduction right at the office. Adding carbon paper to the already-perfected typewriter was only the first in a series of steps, which became an order of magnitude more significant with each iteration: The mimeograph machine allowed paper copies to be mechanically reproduced in a single minute, as opposed to an hour; then the photocopier further reduced that same job to a few seconds, and started taking on more elaborate tasks such as collating and stapling, to speed up the process even more. All of this helped twentieth century business grow ever faster, and replace farming and other manual labors as the dominant activity of the planet.

  The introduction of the computer threatened, at first, to remove paper from the business landscape; there was, after all, not much that you absolutely had to put on paper that wasn’t as good in an electronic file. But general business practices, much like those of Big Pub, were by nature conservative, and those conservative elements had been using paper for… well, forever, as far as they were concerned. The very idea of removing paper from the business processes seemed not only absurd, but downright impossible. It would require no less than a complete top-down reworking of almost every business system and practice, and like Big Pub, few businesses wanted to get into the ramifications of that.

  One of my ea
rliest “real” jobs (as opposed to the no-future jobs I seemed to excel in for years) involved taking electronic documents created by a creative team down the hall and transmitted down the office network, and printing them on computer-run high-seed printers. The idea was to create the highest-quality documents possible, and process them as fast as possible. But they were still being printed in multiple copies onto paper, packaged in notebooks or bound documents, and physically shipped from place to place, because the clients demanded physical products, and our associates did not understand the value of saving money by producing electronic documents only.

  So, despite computers’ paperless promises, the conservative heads of business continued to demand good old, familiar paper. And as documents were now being produced on computer almost exclusively, that meant it was of the utmost importance to find ways of turning efficient electronic files into… inefficient paper documents.

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  The laser printer was invented as a way to allow individual computers to output documents onto paper quickly. Essentially a new type of photocopier, more sophisticated in some ways and simpler in others, laser printers became standard business accessories overnight, and the flow of paper continued unimpeded. But they were not considered ideal: The first laser printers ran slowly and only produced one copy of a document at a time; and there was a matter of inconsistency between the outputs of different computers and different printers—if the hardware, software and settings on either one were different from the hardware, software or settings on another computer and printer, the layout of the prints could come out differently. And computers were still too new and complex for most users to figure out these complex settings, leading to confusion and frustration in offices worldwide.

  And there was another problem: Business was moving along too quickly, further sped up by the introduction of computers and the internet; paper simply couldn’t keep up, even with overnight delivery services and couriers working feverishly to accommodate them. There was a need to speed up the movement of paper, by using the brand-new networking capabilities provided by the Internet and the World Wide Web to create a document here, then send it to be printed there. But there was also a fervent aesthetic desire to make sure copies looked the way you wanted them to look, and the same from printer to printer, and fax machines didn’t provide good-looking paper copies. And they all still wanted paper to come out at the end.

  Engineers at Adobe initially dealt with the problem by devising a printer formatting language that they called PostScript. PostScript helped to standardize laser printer output, no matter what the brand or model, so that electronic documents could come out identically from multiple printers. Unfortunately, that didn’t solve the problem of the computers having different compositional settings, which could still render printed documents differently. Adobe went back to the drawing board, and later developed a document type designed to solve the problem of computer inconsistencies. The document type was known as the Portable Document Format, also known by its file extension, PDF.

  PDF files actually displaced PostScript on most computers and printers, for it essentially did the same job, but better—a PDF file would look the same on any computer screen, and still look the same when it was output onto paper from any printer. Adobe marketed the PDF format, and the requisite Acrobat PDF reading application, aggressively, giving away the readers and PDF-generating print drivers with every Adobe product and most computers, and eventually publishing PDF as an open format, winning endorsement by the International Organization for Standardization (known by their establishment of the ISO standard), finally beating out competing document formats by other companies. Adobe continued to augment and refine the PDF format, adding features that would make it more versatile while retaining its ability to look the same when output by any printer. The hard-won aesthetics of paper documents assured, PDF-dominated printed paper continued to rule the modern business world, and persists to this day.

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  Big Pub was already familiar with the tricks of getting electronic files to paper. Before computers had reached Big Business’ desktops, larger and more specialized computer/printer hybrids were already common in printing environments. These hybrids used a computer to create a digital file that would then be scanned onto a film to create a sheet of type, or “galley.” This film galley would then be taken to a printer and used to mass-produce book pages. The process made it faster and easier to check and correct content, and the film used for printing made for a cleaner end product. Faster meant cheaper, and better-looking product meant more sales… this was clearly enough of a reason to adopt the new electronic systems for Big Pub.

  However, Big Pub was still conservatively run, and simply lacked the foresight to see the value of retaining the electronic files used to create their galleys. Once a galley was run, okayed, and sent to the printer, the electronic file that generated it was erased. To be fair, older electronic equipment was not as efficient at file storage as modern machines, having much more limited hard drive space, sometimes no on-board storage space at all, and needing large plastic disks to store only a few kilobytes of data each. It was seen to be more efficient to re-use the data disks for the new projects, rather than store the data files away for future use. On the other hand, the time and expense of typesetters and editors certainly did not equal the cost of a few plastic disks. Even after subsequent prints of a document would require a fresh typesetting, editing and okaying run, the practicality and value of saving electronic files did not impact Big Pub.

  As a result, most manuscripts printed up to today exist only in paper form in the hands of Big Pub. The potential task of converting all of that literature to electronic files is a daunting one, requiring either the dedicated activity of typesetters, or of people manually scanning each page, then checking and editing, to finally result in exactly what they had on floppy disks years ago, and which could have been transferred to modern formats for use today. The cost of such an undertaking is equally daunting, and as yet, Big Pub has refused to spend the money or commit the manpower to such a task. Only recently have some publishers begun to reapply the electronic files created for the print run to a new production stream, to create e-books for sale. But not every new book gets this treatment, leaving a great deal of literature whose chances of becoming e-books are seriously hindered, first by lack of foresight, and now lack of resources.

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  The recent establishment of on-demand printing is beginning to change the printing landscape again. On-demand printing of literature essentially takes the now-familiar electronic file, prints it onto pages, and binds the pages into something resembling a professionally-printed book. Though the technology for this is not new, only recently has it reached a stage of relative cost-efficiency to make it a feasible proposition.

  On-demand printing allows a producer to create a single copy of a manuscript for a consumer, using what is essentially a customized laser printer and built-in binding station, and the latest machines are capable of producing a single book in less than an hour. The cost per copy cannot compare with a significantly more efficient mass printing run, and on-demand books are often sold for two or three times what a mass-produced version would retail for.

  But the point to on-demand is that there is no mass printing being done for these books, either because no major publisher has expressed an interest in the book, or because the book has already been run, and the publisher has no interest in doing a second run. On-demand allows single to small numbers of copies to be run for individual buyers, creating a micro-market for printed books that had so far been unserved by the publishing industry.

  On-demand printing is now being touted for those who are still more comfortable with paper than with electronic files. In serving the previously-ignored individual consumers, it further broadens the reach of the paper economy, and reconfirms its worth to users. Major segments of the printing industry see this as the future of publishing, creating books on-the-spot for customers, and thereby remo
ving the process of mass printing, and the risk of printed and unsold books that will eventually be scrapped at a loss. But this process is more costly per copy, as stated above, and the extra cost of on-demand printing ends up being shifted to the consumer in the form of higher prices for each book.

  Turning a mass-production industry into a boutique industry is not likely to result in products that will be cheaper to buy, and the availability of an on-demand printer will dictate availability of a book. Nonetheless, on-demand is seen by many publishers as their future: Keeping literature tied to paper, no matter what format it was in originally.

  4: The Web—The wild card no one knew was in the deck

  Though the Internet had existed as a researcher’s tool for quite some time, it was not introduced to the general public until around 1980. At first only of interest to self-proclaimed computer geeks, the early services of companies like CompuServe served to introduce users to concepts like electronic messaging, discussion forums and online billboards. These services were mostly interesting to professionals and hobbyists at first, but slowly the amount of content expanded and proliferated, and more of the public began to “get online.”

  One of the larger entities on the Internet, prior to the web, was the Newsgroup system. Newsgroups were electronic bulletin boards, each devoted to a particular subject, that allowed users to post messages, answer questions, or post documents for others to download at will. Some of the first e-books were exchanged in this way, providing the first-ever potentially global outreach for many an amateur author. Some of the first adverse issues that would face e-books, namely, the illegal dissemination of copywritten material and the circulation of poor-quality content, were likewise first seen here. For a time, the Web and the Newsgroups existed in equal strength beside each other. But as the web has grown, it has pushed the Newsgroups out of popularity, until today they have become what they originally were: Congregating areas for geeks, and largely ignored by or unknown to everyone else.