RicDay on Publishing

Years ago, while living in Asia, I watched Sony (BetaMax) and JVC (VHS) duke it out for format supremacy. There have been many more “format wars” since then, but one we are in the midst of bothers me the most: ePub versus Amazon’s AZW.

In the videotape wars, Sony’s better technology lost the fight to JVC's better marketing. Most consumers did not understand or care about the technical differences; they were swayed by the relentless pursuit of more “bells and whistles” by the makers in the VHS camp; by the number of brand names which joined the VHS camp; and by the fast ride down the pricing curve of VHS devices.

I see something similar happening in today’s formats for ereaders. Amazon’s Kindle generates huge media coverage and Amazon uses its heft to bully publishers into selling their ebooks at the $9.99 retail price point. Low ebook prices and aggressive marketing drive Amazon’s efforts. Kudos to Amazon for finally making ebooks somewhat mainstream.

The Problem

Amazon’s proprietary AZW format, to put it kindly, is extremely crude. Its text formatting ability is awful — comparable to the first or second edition of Netscape Navigator, around the time Microsoft launched Windows 95. Worse, only a Kindle can read this format.

The IPDF’s ePub standard uses nearly complete CSS (2.0) and XML/XHTML (1.1) for formatting, which means rich formatting is quite possible in ePub books. It also means that properly tagged ePub files are easily reused — minimal effort is needed to move your files to the Web, to an iPhone, or into InDesign CS4 for print.

So here is the conundrum: ignore Amazon’s Kindle and you will probably be leaving significant sales on the table. For most publishers, this will not be an option. Concentrate on the Kindle only, and you will lock yourself into a crude, non-reusable, closed format.

Solution

Build your workflows around the ePub format. This means converting manuscripts to plain text (assuming you receive them as .doc or similar), then tag them using XHTML 1.1 according to the ePub standard. Once that is done, you can import the resulting files into InDesign, or create ePub files aimed at different hardware and software platforms (e.g. Adobe Digital Editions on the desktop, or Stanza on the iPhone), or take chunks of the book and display them as preview reading on your website. At most, you might need to have different CSS files for the different outputs.

Finally, create a macro program to degenerate the XHTML code to the crude coding needed for Amazon’s AZW.

Hardware versus Software

An easily made mistake would be to assume the hardware is what is important. It is not. The Kindle, along with all those other ebook readers, will evolve. They may well disappear, replaced by new versions of netbooks, or large tablet computers. The one certainty in technology is change. Creating and managing your book files in an open, standard format is the best insurance you can give yourself that the changes in reading software and devices do not render your investment obsolete.