Selling Your eBooks - E-Book Formats and Standards

To understand why standardization of formats is so important for electronic books we need to sit in the "reader's" or "consumer's" chair for a moment. Imagine you have visited a site, read an excerpt about what sounds like an excellent e-book, purchase it on-line, download it to your computer .... only to discover you can't read it because you do not have the executable software program to open it. You find out the software you require is free to download off the Net, but maybe you don't have enough available memory on your system, or maybe you don't have all the minimum hardware/software requirements to run it... or maybe you are so new to computers you're afraid you'll mess yours up by downloading and attempting to install software programs on it.

E-book sellers cannot possibly include executable programs for every possible hardware/software contingency. There are far too many variables (including operating systems - Linux, Windows, NT, etc.) and the program itself would be far too huge! Most sites offering electronic books for sale indicate right up front what your system requirements are for reading the book(s) you are about to purchase. If you are planning to sell e-books yourself be sure to provide this information for visitors to your site so there are no surprises for them after receiving your book. Let them know if they will require Adobe Acrobat (if your book is in .pdf format) or Netscape and/or Internet Explorer (if your book is in .html format) and the version level of it (version 4.0 or higher, etc.). Also, try to make it easy for them to obtain any necessary free programming software by posting a link to it (or them) on your site. If you know, also post what e-book readers your book is compatable with for viewing/download.

"The Open eBook Forum (OEBF) is an association of hardware and software companies, publishers, authors and users of electronic books and related organizations whose goals are to establish common specifications for electronic book systems, applications and products that will benefit creators of content, makers of reading systems and, most importantly, consumers, helping to catalyze the adoption of electronic books; to encourage the broad acceptance of these specifications on a worldwide basis among members of the Forum, related industries and the public; and to increase awareness and acceptance of the emerging electronic publishing industry."

Yes, there are people currently working on (attempting to) standardize electronic publishing standards. Just as, a long time ago, there were people working on standards for HTML, Internet Protocol, etc., etc. Standards are important for a few reasons, but I believe the most important is: using a format standard to most people = most people having access to the product/information/etc.

At the time of writing this section of our topic (Dec. 8, 2000) the OEBF had completed the following:
"The primary technical achievement of the OEBF has been the creation of the Open eBook Publication Structure specification. This specification for eBook file and format structure is based on HTML and XML, the languages used to create information for Web sites. The goal of the specification is to quickly create a critical mass of compelling content. A publisher can format a title once according to the specification and the content will be compatible with a wide variety of reading devices. This agreement on a common set of file specifications will allow publishers to reach a large audience without separately reformatting their titles for each machine. This specification is designed to be compatible with the development plans of the major eBook efforts already underway."

Also, at the time of writing this section of our topic, the OEBF announced its second working group summit would be held in Denver, CO - December 4th-8th, 2000. We do not have the results of this summit at this time.

So, what do we do at this point? Do we wait with all our great e-book ideas until the standardization is complete and promoted to the masses? Or, do we proceed with our project(s) and make modifications (if necessary) when the standards have been formalized?

I can't make this decision for you. I can only make it for myself... but I can tell you this, standardization may take a very, very, very long time by Internet standards. Thousands and thousands of electronic books are already being produced, by both well-known authors and unknown authors. I, personally, am not going to wait to the point of market saturation... but rather have already begun drafting my projects. My format of choice is .html (mainly because, as a web designer, this is the format I am most comfortable using), and my compiling software of choice is E-ditor which works extremely well in this format.