00/01/24 - More OEB Flak...
In a past column, I mentioned the Open EBook (OEB) standard and some people’s irrational resistance to it. I’m sad to say it seems to be getting worse.
Not too long ago, Bill Gates demoed the new PocketPC on Larry King. This is the next generation Windows CE device, although it seems that Microsoft has wised up and decided to completely drop the CE moniker, which had way too much accumulated bad karma to ever overcome. The big addition to these new devices seems to be ClearType™, Microsoft’s trademarked version of sub-pixel font rendering. I don’t want to get too deep into an explanation of what this does (although there’s a great one here), but basically it allows the system to antialias the individual red, green and blue elements that make up a single pixel. On a color LCD this effectively grants you three times the horizontal display resolution for black text on white, resulting in a remarkable increase in text sharpness and clarity. Although this “innovation” is not unique to Microsoft and it will certainly be rolled out by others (are you listening, Palm?), Microsoft is pushing it pretty hard because it’s the key to Microsoft Reader’s success, and Microsoft seems intent on “reinventing” CE palmtops as more functional competitors to the Rocket and Softbook rather than slower and clumsier alternatives to Palms.
Microsoft Reader will thus be the pre-eminent application on the new Pocket PC, and this time I think Microsoft may have gotten it right. Now anyone who knows me knows I’m not a Microsoft apologist. I’m not even an especially willing Microsoft user. I won’t go near any current incarnation of CE, I happily ran OS/2 on my desktop until I was forced to install Windows to remain competitive in the IT job market, and I still plan on ditching Windows for Linux as soon as I can sync my Visor USB without Windows. But Microsoft Reader is a new product for a new market, and for once it’s not the same old “us over the world” mentality that’s made Microsoft so vilified in the past.
Under the hood, Reader is just an XML browser, and very likely shares a lot of code with IE5. The difference is ClearType™, as mentioned above, and the fact that Reader is optimized for the OEB dialect of XML. This is the first time, near as I can remember, that Microsoft has adopted an open, freely-modifiable file format (HTML is closed) and I think that’s great. A lot of people disagree with me, stating that Microsoft has a track record of taking over a so-called standard, making it their own, and locking people into their system. The argument goes that they’ll support OEB in theory, but that it’s only a matter of time before they add enough of their own proprietary crap to it that it becomes Microsoft OEB™ and you have to use their reader to read it.
As I understand it, this can’t happen. OEB is an open standard, and unlike HTML, the methods for extending it are also open and well-documented. Anything Microsoft adds has to conform to the spec, or they can’t call it OEB. They can add tags, they can extend it, but it all has to conform to the spec. If the additions they make can’t be read in any OEB reader, it’s not OEB anymore. Finally, we have something Microsoft can’t screw it up if they want to keep the ability to ride the OEB name. It’s in their best interest to conform to the industry, not the other way around.
As for the Digital Rights Management issue, let me put this out there one more time in plain, simple language, so that there’s as little ambiguity as possible.
That’s right, you heard me. The very concept of DRM is a fool’s paradise; the security of DRM is Atlantis, a unicorn and an honest politician, which is to say it doesn’t exist. DRM is a poison, and ebooks that are the most successful will use as little DRM as possible.
Here’s the thing. Anything that can be cracked will be cracked. That’s just a fact of life. I’ve worked with hackers before, and anything that presents a challenge to them is fair game. And that’s my point. The key to avoiding the hackers and crackers is to not make it worth their time to look at you.
Let me give you an example. My first novel, Between Heaven and Hell, and my first nonfiction book, Writing On Your Palm, have essentially no DRM whatsoever. You have to supply a credit card to download them from Handango, but that’s it. Once you’ve paid for your copy, it’s yours. You are free to do whatever you want with it. I don’t even have the .zip file password protected. A lot of you, particularly those with traditional publishing backgrounds, probably think this is total insanity.
Which just proves you don’t get it.
The paradigm is changing, folks, and quickly. Those who don’t get on board will be left in the dust. It works like this. I provide the first 15-20% of my books for free, so that people can get a good taste of it. For Between Heaven and Hell, that comes to what would be fifty pages of a 300 page paperback. I figure if you read fifty pages of a book, you’re going to know whether you like it enough to buy it or not. If you like it, pay for it and you get the rest. That in and of itself isn’t too different from print, but that’s also where the similarity ends.
See, ebooks aren’t just print on pixels. It’s a totally different media, with totally different methods of marketing, sales and distribution. The old models no longer apply. We’re making up a whole new ballgame here, people, and if you get nothing else from this column, remember that. Writing and selling ebooks requires a completely different set of assumptions than for paper publishing.
Here’s what’s different. With a digital copy of my book and no DRM to speak of, there’s nothing stopping anyone from emailing it to a few dozen of their friends. In print, this kind of duplication would be suicide for the work, but, as I will keep pointing out until it sinks in, ebooks ain’t print. I hope my satisfied readers duplicate my book and pass it on. The more the merrier, as it saves me the marketing. Inside each of my books is a link to my website, and instructions on how to pay for the book if they came by it for free. Those that enjoy it are held to the honor system to pay for it. Quite a few do. Those who don’t wouldn’t likely have bought it anyway, so at least they get something they might enjoy. If the whole point of security is to keep the honest people honest, why make it any more of a pain for them than you have to?
You can make a lot of money on the internet, and the days of making money by writing are far from over. But we have to question the assumptions we make about how to treat the readers. The old ways don’t work anymore, and trying to impose them on the new world of epublishing is destined for failure. Let’s all take a tip from the music industry and realize that the internet is a revolution in marketing and distribution, and that we’re all starting again at zero.
Jeff Kirvin
jkirvin@yahoo.com