There Is No eBook Standards "War"

Last week, PC World had an article last week suggesting a Format War for ebooks is brewing - One similar to the HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray format war. The latest catalyst was Google's entrance into ebooks. I think this is a little (actually VERY) over hyped situation. There is almost no similarity between the next gen DVD and eBooks.

HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray was years in the making. That battle cost the involved businesses millions in R&D, manufacturing, and marketing. Worse still, consumers who picked the wrong side were left with hundreds, even thousands of dollars in outmoted equipment and disc.

The first difference with eBooks is that there are more than 2 options. Sony has their own style(lrf\lrx) and Amazon has their own style (AZW), also there's ePub which is an openly developed standard. Also, there's formats transferred from PCs (such as PDF, text, html, etc...). Oh, and there's also Mobipocket and a dozen other formats that you probably haven't ever heard of. So that's the first difference is that there are more than 2 formats in competition.

For Blu-Ray(Sony) and HD-DVD(Toshiba) there was a financial incentive for the businesses to want their format to succeed. They wanted to collect on license fees. They collect a fee for every machine, or software program written that could read their format. They even charge a per disk fee for every disk that is manufactured and sold. The companies had every reason to want their format to beat out the other one.

There isn't that incentive for ebooks... mostly. The state of most eBook formats fall into 1 of 3 general categories:

1. Completely Open and Free(with or without DRM)
2. Open without DRM, Closed or license for DRM
3. Proprietary

No license for the first category. There is some incentive to win a "standards" war for the second and third category. However, not nearly as much as disks. License fees are only collected for programs that consume or create the eBooks. There isn't a per file cost as there are with DVDs. In addition, many of the programs to read the formats are given away for free by the companies.

The third and most important difference is that, with the eBook "war", is that it's near impossible for the consumers to lose. The Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD, the loss for consumers was easy to see. If a consumer bought the "losing" equipment they are now out hundreds - even thousands - of dollars in outmoted equipment and movies that they will soon not be able to play on anything. The hardware of Blu-Ray used different hardware and lasers than HD-DVD.

Ebooks are software! If you have an ebook writer that can't read a certain format the manufacturer can always release new "firmware" so that it can read a new format. Better still you can always convert from one format to another (hopefully legally). A practice that wasn't really an option with physical disks. This really is the most important difference. Consumers don't have to worry that they might be buying a 300$ brick.

So if you agree with my dismantling of a "format war", how do we look at all the different ebook formats out there? A better model to understand what is going on is to look at the previous format competition for digital music format and word processor document formats.

Both digital music and word processor document formats that have already been fought and settled, have a lot more in common with ebooks. All three had more than 2 options, difficult to leverage license fees from the winner, and all 3 are software based.

Not only are these better models, but they give us 2 different results of the results of the ebook format competition.

One scenario result would follow the results of the digital music formats. In digital music, mp3 won. MP3 is a open and free standard that anyone can use without having to pay any company the rights to create, or use mp3s. There are still proprietary digital music formats, of course. But in every case-be it Windows Audio, iTunes, or a CD ripper- if your program can't convert to or from mp3s it is just plain primitive.

The other scenario is the word proccesor documents. A long long time ago, there were lots and lots of word processor programs. Each company would try to outdo each other by supporting their own proprietary document format as well as their competitors. There was no effort to make a standard across all applications. Eventually, Microsoft's doc(.doc) format won and became a de facto standard. Partially from being an able document format and also the proliferation of Microsoft Office. Just like MP3s and music, no word processor dares to enter the market unless it can read and write .doc documents (see openoffice and google documents). Fortunately, they didn't charge other companies for reading their files. Unfortunately, this result left one company with complete control over current and future formats. They also had the upper hand because other companies must reverse engineer the spec as Microsoft didn't open the specification until more than 15 years after it's creation.

• What will happen to ebooks? Will an open format or a proprietary format become the standard? I don't know. What I do know is the following:
• A standard will eventually emerge
• The "losers" will be able to easily convert over to the "winner"
• For a proprietary format to win it would have to be from massive proliferation of content and devices that use the format exclusively. From where I'm sitting, Amazon and it's Kindle device, are the only ones in a position to win that war.
• Finally, and most importantly, none of this should be a factor in delaying your purchase of an ebook reader.

The next 18 months should be enough time to prove me right, or prove me a fool.