Writers Magazine 2009

Reports from the 2009 London Book Fair

by London bookworm 2009

2: Have Ebooks finally arrived?

Ebooks have been around for a decade but there was something special this year. E-publishing was a prominent theme of this year’s seminars and briefings given at the London Book Fair 2009, with its own modest section, well away from those dealing with paper books.

The focus was not on the various readers and bits of hardware. It was not especially about the content becoming accessible for Ereaders. The focus was on the adoption of an ebook design standard. This standard offers publishers promised inter-operability between present and future hardware platforms. Adopting a standard means that those making readers can expect to find an exciting supply of material. Those publishing material can supply one file which all the readers can use. The virtuous circle is complete, at last.

This standard has been produced by an organisation called IDPF.org, which has unlocked the market by providing publishers with a single standard for their books. The format, known as EPub, provides the standard way to mark up text for all the ebook reader makers. It uses XML tags which are very similar to the HTML tags that occasionally become visible when you are looking at web pages enclosed inside the <braces>.

XML is simply a set of instructions for the reader’s software to interpret so that the book looks good on the screen, just like Internet browser software. As well as providing a way to re-flow the content for digital books and publications, EPub has to deal with the extra dimension offered by the technology, which the printed book format cannot provide.

Credit must go to Sony, who launched their Reader in September 2008, since they were the first to adopt the Epub format for the mass market and they did not attempt to impose a proprietary standard for their reader, learning the expensive lesson of the  Betamax video format.

Standards

The file extension is .epub for the XML format and uses 3 open standards (Open Publication Structure (OPS), Open Packaging Format (OPF) and Open Container Format (OCF), not to be confused with the Open eBook Publication (OEB), published in 1999 and the precursor to OPS.)

So EPub allows publishers to supply one digital file for the distribution network. Ereaders such as the Kindle, which is used by Amazon, will convert Epub to Mobireader format while Stanza can take the files and tweak then for iPhone users. These key providers of the readers need their own converters in order to optimise the file to allow the content to take full advantage of their particular device.

The proliferation of standards threatened to stifle the Ebook but lessons have been learnt. Other industries have shown that it is vital to make it easy for publishers and other creatives to provide the material. It is also vital to give users confidence that their purchase will remain readable.

So this standardization is good news for publishers as it removes one obstacle to entering the ebook market. However, it does mean that it is the device supplier who generally becomes the retailer. Just as iTunes became the leading music shop, the world’s biggest bookshop might be an unknown right now but games consoles could be a contender.

Adobe has added an export option inside the forthcoming CS4 package as a part of Indesign. So the book can be exported as a .pdf for printers to use or as .epub for ebook readers. Similar converters can be found for other text design packages such as Quark Xpress and a market for converters will soon be available for free or at a small charge.

Job done?

Conversion is not quite all that is required. A book is book-shaped, while ereaders might be phone-shaped or monitor-shaped. So a bit of tweaking is required if the experience of good design is to carry over from the printed to the electronic version of the book.

This point was stressed by all those advocating ebooks. So it is now important that book designers think about their use on very small screens right from the beginning of the design process. As a result some specialist design houses have spring up. They will undertake the conversion of a PDF but reckon that they require rather more than a simple addition of tags. Starting from the PDF, rather than going back to the original design, will achieve 90% or higher of the look intended for the book. But they claim that the further back one goes in the design process the better the finished product is likely.

What do the readers have to offer?

The first generation did not allow images, but the new Kindle Reader offers 16 shades of grey and this does justice to most images and of course the iPhone screen, although much smaller, will render images in colour. The epub format allows colour images to be provided and the device suppliers take it from there to optimise the images for their device.

The present readers allow the font to be scaled but do not do anything very exciting to add value to the new format. But it should not be long before people begin to exploit the new technology so how long before your device will read the text aloud to you, which might be ideal for joggers and bedtime stories - Who knows?

And what is to stop background music or images being embedded – there could be links to other information or to take you elsewhere in the book. Perhaps you have forgotten who a character is or need a synopsis if you have lost the plot. There are endless, electronic possibilities.

Growth

Some startling figures for the growth rate of the ebook market were produced at the LBF.  But before getting carried away, it is worth bearing in mind that all eformats are still struggling to achieve 1% of the publishing industry by volume or value. And student texts still dominate the epublishing market.

However it would be unwise to ignore growth rates which are quoted at over 100% month-on-month (Q4 2008). The future of the ebook and the acceptability of using the reading devices is no longer in any doubt. And given the small price advantage of ebooks, some insiders have speculated that the present financial difficulties will enhance rather than reduce the spread of ebooks.

One issue that remains, and those who still use iTunes will be well aware of it, is digital rights management systems (DRM), where the owner of the copyright goes to some lengths to try and ensure that the file can only be downloaded to one receiver. This is something we will have to live with.

Pricing

The publisher’s logic suggests pricing the ebook a little bit below the price that one would pay for a book that has to be printed onto paper and then distributed with all those additional costs. However recently published books are still being priced close to the price that one would expect to pay for the printed book and one is really only saving the few pounds that the paper pulp would have cost the supply chain to deliver the pbook. There is little evidence that the industry has learnt from the mistakes made by the music business.

The evidence suggests that the ebook will cost between six and seven pounds in the UK and the issue is slightly complicated by the fact that, as a digital product, even though it is also a book, it attracts sales tax (known as VAT - value added tax) in Britain. Books have traditionally been exempt from tax but one could speculate that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the not too distant future, will seek to remove this anomaly and bring printed books into line with ebooks by adding tax to the latter rather than removing it from the former. That’s life.

It is quite possible that there will be more price flexibility with ebooks than with printed books as the former has lower distribution and production costs. The danger of prices being driven down by the lowest common nominator is perceived to be a very real one and one which makes publishing executives very nervous.

They are quite happy to look at a more flexible model for the e-book and ideas such as giving away a chapter or a synopsis for free and then charging perhaps 75 or 80% of the printed book seemed to be one that might find favour at the corporate level.

Availability

For the moment the biggest libraries of ebooks are those that contain the old classics and it is reported that one of the first books people choose to download is ‘War and Peace’, that doorstop of a book everyone already claims to own and few claim to have read.

Travel and cookbooks along with student textbooks are still the big markets, more imaginative production will certainly be coming to an ereader near you soon. How long will it be before the hybrid books which integrate video and text or mixes music with words and film clips?

© Chas Jones 2009

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