Digitally representing printed content is only the first step in digital publishing's evolution. More and more, digital publications - whether downloaded or consumed online - are going to incorporate interactivity and rich media in order to deliver more value to their readers. Digital textbooks are going to integrate eLearning experiences, such as simulations and assessments. Trade books are going to incorporate value-added elements, a la DVDs, such as video interviews with authors and socially-networked play-along whodunits. Flash is already widely adopted and a de facto industry standard, and so is an obvious choice to utilize for implementing such experiences. Adobe taking steps to fully opening Flash specifications and increasing the proliferation of Flash implementations only makes this even more of a no brainer.

No insult intended to author Zeraus nee Suarez who "is planning to release a sequel". It may be great stuff. But these are not stats to write home about, much less to hang a "who needs Random House" thesis on. Per an established literary agent:

Less than 5000 actual sales, result: misery... A solid midlist novel would reap on the order of 3,500-7,000 hardcover sales and 10,000-25,000 paperbacks in the US.

Was Daemon the best self-publishing succes story Josh McHugh could come up with? If that's the case, and a Silicon Valley social-network-savvy marketing campaign and the support of A-list bloggers was insufficient to yield interesting sales, then predctions of imminent trade-publishing doom start to sound a lot less realistic.

It doesn’t make sense to me to have a retailer like Amazon dictate to a publisher the market for their product. Having an agreed upon standard that is open to other manufacturers creates competition and can serve to open the market for digital ... An end to the format wars is a win for publishers. It’s a win for consumers

However, it would appear that Jane is not fully aware of of recent progress toward this goal.

Of course, PDF is already the clear winner as the open standard for final-form paginated content. The "eBook Format Wars' of which Jane speaks were never about alternatives to PDF for print-fidelity content, they were about formats to represent reflow-centric content. It would be nice if we could have had one file format for all eBook purposes, and indeed Adobe was insistent for quite some time that PDF was that format. Yet, while PDF became the most popular eBook format, it has always fallen down when it came to mobile device support. In a world where content will be consumed on a wide variety of screen sizes, binding to a particular paginated representation is unhelpful. Arguably the PDF "capabilities gap" and Adobe's stubborness helped foster the eBook format wars, as a plethora of reflow-centric formats emerged.

Those who took the other extreme - arguing that PDF is entirely unnecessary for eBooks - missed the point that some content is heavily designed around a particular paginated representation, and may not make sense to recast in a "liquid" representation. Many textbooks and children's books may just not make sense to target for reading on a 3 inch mobile screen. Digital publishing is not just about linear texts such as novels.And printing is not going away any time soon. The preferred representation for many books, magazines, and newspapers will remain high-fidelity PDF .It's not that PDF is bad, it's just not sufficient. And, for many eBook use cases such as novels, it's not necessarily the best solution as a distribution format.

But now we finally have a distribution-ready standard for reflow-centric conten to complement PDF: IDPF EPUB . EPUB evolved from the existing OEBPS interchange standard, and was approved as a final standard last Fall by a unanimous vote of the IDPF membership, and is rapidly gaining adoption. EPUB adds single-file packaging - the lack of which was the Achille's Heel of OEPBS - as well as support for structured table of contents, SVG vector graphics, DAISY DTBook support, and embedded fonts. So EPUB supports design-rich distribution-ready publications, wtihin a reflowable structure-centric content model.

I'm hearing more and more from eBook conversion vendors who are being asked by publishers to create EPUB, as well as from publishers who want to directly create EPUB. And Adobe's going all-in on supporting both PDF and EPUB for digital publishing. Adobe supports EPUB export from InDesign CS3, which we have been actively enhancing. We are also working with the open source community to develop EPUB validation tools and scripts to convert other XML formats such as DocBook to EPUB. Adobe Digital Editions natively supports both PDF and EPUB, and we've had over 1 million downloads of Digital Ediitons 1.0 since its launch last June (a beta of Digital Editions 1.5, which supports content portability with our DRM solution, is now out on Adobe Labs).

We aren't quite over the hump yet - we still need to establish a significant EPUB inventory gaining retailer and library support, deliver on device support, etc.. And there are still a few additional issues to be attacked - such as DRM interoperability. Meantime, publishers need to remain vigilant and reject any "yet another eBook format" attempts (whether from Redmond, Cupertino, or elsewhere). But the big picture is that the industry is finally on track to end the eBook format wars of the last decade, and start reaping the publisher and consumer peace dividends. Tellingly, one major eBook retailer, despite promoting their own proprietary format, has quietly begun accepting EPUB submissions from publishers. To me, that says it's all over but the shouting.

That dialog has always seemed a bit senseless to me since Web browsers by default play rich media content without such warnings. Perhaps it made sense back when Adobe was integrating with 3rd-party multimedia engines not under our control, but heck it's now Adobe Flash. But as a solution targeting enterprises & knowledge workers Acrobat/Reader is under a number of constraints so I guess this conservative behavior is somewhat understandable. As Digital Editions is a consumer-focused solution, and built on Flex/Flash, we decided to make the experience with Flash-enhanced content truly seamless.

A wide range of text-centric content can potentially benefit from the ability to add rich media & interactivity, from eLearning-enhanced digital textbooks to novels that can add ancillary content to make reading more engaging and entertaiing. I'm looking forward to seeing what creative authors and publishers start coming up with.

- Painfully slow current-location-relative navigation. Going to any but the next or previous page is a real chore. There’s a non-reliable “type ahead” with repeated presses of the page buttons, but with the almost full-second time to show a page it can most charitably be described as “stately”. Any mostly you end up in a “press-wait-press-wait” loop. Even with fiction I found this problematic, especially given the propensity to accidentally press the awkwardly located next/prev page buttons. But with non-fiction this was an out-and-out hair-pulling experience. A paper book of course is quickly

- Cumbersome menus. For example, pressing the font-size button brings up a menu, warping the “cursor” on the LCD stripe up to the top of the screen, with the “Close” menu item selected. So you need to move your eye focus from the very bottom (where the font size button is located) up to the top, move your thumb up to the cursor roller-button, take note of the current value (which has an arrow indication), roll the cursor down to the desired font size, then click to select. The Sony Reader’s simple font-size button function simply increments around the set of sizes, providing immediate visual feedback via the updated page view. In contrast, the Kindle implementation seems incredibly cumbersome. Implementing a volume control on an MP3 player by popping up a modal menu would be crazy – the font size feature seems analogous for a reading system.

- Slow text input, which makes searching a chore. If I raced a person reading a paper book to read all the pages containing a given index term, I’d lose by a country mile. The fact that searches always return results from all content was also distractive. Digital should kick butt over paper in searchability – so this is almost shameful. The frequently-displayed tip on using accelerators like "@store" to constrain searches was almost laughable - given the s-l-o-w typing experience, the term "accelerator" hits an ironic note.

- No intrinsic lighting, plus glare with focused light sources. Let's face it, a lot of reading goes on in bed, much of it next to a sleeping spouse. The opaque reflective display that makes E Ink excel in sunlight leaves it no better than paper in the dark. I had thought that the lack of an edge LCD was just a cost issue, but after more use I think there may be deeper issues. Using various book lights and flashlights, the glass frontplate of Kindle caused a lot of reflective glare. Best results with Kindle were obtained from diffuse light sources at a wide angle; but these days most portable book lights tend to be of the high-intensity LCD variety and angled acutely to the display surface.This was a situation where I found paper still delivered a significantly superior reading experience.

For most of these issues the Amazon Kindle team at Lab 126 can't be blamed; they are hamstrung by the limitations of the current generation of E Ink display subsystem and overall Kindle is a very usable breakthrough device. And, pioneers are destined to take some arrows. Luckily, this display technology is rapidly improving, especially in refresh rate, so these issues should be much improved even within just the next year.

One suggestion for the Kindle team: you went to all the trouble of putting a quick-refresh LCD “strip” on Kindle, why don’t you use it more? For example, why not support navigating to a location by using the LCD as a scroll bar, which it already resembles: e.g. hold down the “ALT” key and the strip shows your relative position in the current book, and as you roll whenever you pause it moves the page view to that location – bingo, fast navigation, like thumbing through a paper book. Hit back button and you are back to your previous reading view. BTW after a week of heavy use it seems obvious that the separate LCD strip is more clever hack than fundamental user interface concept; Scoble's Kindle review was overly harsh but I completely agree that a touch-screen UI is eventually going to be a much better way to go - and even with the current E Ink technology the iRex iLiad delivers a nice experience with touch screen.

But I'm already a convert - the real evidence was the attention I received from a procession of people wanting to know what I was doing, which invariably led to the inquirer getting excited and expressing keen interest in adopting eBooks. Never once did I get an "oh, OK" kind of response. And it's clear why: the gringos of Yelapa are truly desperate for reading material! Yelapa is accessible only by a 30 minute open boat ride, and the local book supply is a few slim shelves of left-behind paperbacks at various restaurants and casitas. Even those who only spend a week at Yelapa are likely to exhaust the reading supply they are able to reasonably include in their luggage budget - and there are people here who stay months on end or year-round. So these folks - by no means gadget-philes, after all this is laid-back car-free Yelapa that only got electricity 4 years ago - immediately realized that eBooks were a compelling, practical solution to being able to read what they want, wherever they are.

I did come up with a laundry list of usability issues with Kindle that I'll post about in a separate review, and will compare and contrast with the Sony Reader, but to me the bottom line is that I finally feel confident in saying that eBooks have really arrived as a consumer-relevant media type. Market forces and the continuation of Moore's Law will lead to radically improved reading systems in the coming years, but it's already become a no-brainer. My ever-practical spouse questioned whether it was a good idea to bring an eBook reader on this trip. It's clear that next time she'll be questioning whether we should take up space and weight with any books of the paper variety.

Buying eBooks in a proprietary vendor-specific format that can only be used on that vendor's device is a mug's game. Kindle is far more closed even than iPod, which started out and have remained primarily players for MP3s, easily made from any audio CD. While Kindle supports a couple of non-DRM publication formats (unfortunately not yet PDF or EPUB), there's almost no supply of non-DRM commercial content, a situation unlikely to change any time soon. Amazon touts 90,000 titles on the Kindle Store but searching for any topic will quickly reveal that it's still quite a thin selection - a substantial number of the titles seem to be relatively obscure treatises and for-sale DRMed versions of public domain works. Leaving aside quality issues with the titles, Kindle Store selection of consumer-relevant content feels somewhat less comprehensive than an average major-airport bookstore. Underwhelming, yes - but the real zinger is that you're completely out of luck if Amazon's sole-source store doesn't have what you want to read.

For a healthy eBook ecosystem, readers need to be able to choose where they want to get their content, and where they want to read it. That's what Adobe is working to enable. Admittedly we still have a lot of work to do, but there's going to be some major steps forward in the very near future. Sony and Adobe announced back in June that Sony Reader products would gain support for the EPUB open eBook standard, reflow capabiliies for PDF, and Adobe's DRM, supported by hundreds of online bookstores and libraries. Adobe has also noted that we'll be enhancing the DRM support in Adobe Digital Editions to enable content transfer across multiple PCs and devices. Yesterday Adobe open sourced a tool to validate EPUB titles for conformance to the IDPF standard.

Heading off to a sunny beach, Kindle in hand, I thank Amazon for taking eBooks a major step forward in 2007, and I applaud Jeff Bezos and the Lab126 team for their creativity and persistence. Amazon clearly has an incentive to maximize its retail opportunities. As the open eBook ecosystem grows, dedicated reading devices, convergence devices, and PCs improve as platforms for reading, and it becomes clear that "cornering the market" with a sole-source/sole-device solution is not going to fly, I hope that Amazon (already an IDPF member) will end up becoming a major participant in, and contributor to, the broader digital publishing ecosystem.

The increasing mainstream adoption of digital publishing and eBooks - noted in today's Telegraph - stands to be significantly accelerated by convergence to open interoperable standards for eBooks. Hachette's move also signals the breadth of support for open standards: this is not one or a few companies getting together to dictate a solution. The IDPF's nearly 100 members include publishers, technology vendors, trade and textbook publishers, educational institutions, libraries and other governmental bodies, and this group unanimously approved the new epub standards earlier this month. The point is not to advantage any single vendor or publisher, but that the industry as a whole can only grow if we create an open, healthy ecosystem that inspires confidence on the part of publisher and consumers. There's more work to do - DRM is still a tough nut - but with epub providing the open standard complement to PDF for reflow-centric text-based content, we are well on our way.

The article glosses over the key point that "iTunes" is not synonymous with "iTunes Store". Even the new directly-competitive Amazon Music Store prominently touts right on its top banner "All songs compatible with iTunes...". It's interesting that Apple's dominance of PC music library software is somewhat independent of iTunes Store and even iPod - and is predicated on Apple's support of the open standard MP3 format. With only 22 iTunes Store songs per iPod there would be an awful lot of empty iPods and iTunes libraries if it weren't for unprotected MP3s from CDs and other sources.

Could one possible outcome be for Apple to retain its PC music player dominance by supporting multiple stores, and maybe even non-Apple devices, more explicitly in iTunes? Or will the linkage between iTunes and iTunes Store grow ever tighter, with users seeking freedom of choice in content sources and downstream devices forced to seek elsewhere for well-integrated PC music library solutions? And how will this shake out for other content types? In music Apple certainly has the pole position - but for video downloads it's stil early days and other solutions - including our forthcoming Adobe Media Player - are certainly still in the hunt.

For eBooks and other text-based content I think it's even less likely that we'll see a single monolithic end-to-end solution with majority market share. There are just too many channels via which books, magazines, and other publications get out to readers. The Slate article points out that Universal controls "one out of every three new albums sold in the United States" - print publishing has consolidated quite a bit but no one has that kind of control. That's why Adobe's supporting open eBook standards, including PDF and IDPF epub, making sure our Digital Editions software supports acquisition from the user's choice of Web-based retailers and libraries, and working to enable multiple devices to consume this content.

There's a broader issue with use of our new InDesign feature that I'd like to touch on here: the tradeoffs between authoring PDF and EPUB. Many content authors have long been firmly rooted in a "WYSIWYG" mindset, and some have as a result expected EPUB to be some kind of XML version of PDF, that preserves all the composition of InDesign. That's not the case: if you want final-form fidelity, you should stick with PDF - that's what it was designed for, and it does its job very well. EPUB is designed to represent a more adaptive portable document - one that encapsulates a sequence of linear text flows ("Stories" in InDesign/InCopy lingo). Content-level styling can be applied (via CSS), final-form content can be embedded within a text flow (as SVG or Flash SWF), and hints as to page-level formatting can be applied (via our XSL-FO-based extensions to EPUB), but at the end of the day it's up to an EPUB processor to determine the proper page layout based on a user's screen size, resolution, font size preferences, etc. And different EPUB renderers are free to make different line layout decisions.

One implication of this is that "your mileage may vary" in creating EPUB from InDesign CS3. If you have a nice linear book, with InDesign stories flowed into well-designed page templates things should go well - especially if you follow the tips in Peter & Piotr's post. If you created page layouts manually in a "pasteboard" manner, then things may get a bit stickier. Again, you may choose in this case to just stick with high-fidelity PDF. Our DIgital Editions software natively supports both PDF and EPUB as first-class citizens. But if you want the benefits of adaptive layout, mobile device optimization, and increased accessiblity of using EPUB, you may wish to reconsider your authoring workflow, to more consistently utilize InDesign Story flows to pave the way for structured EPUB XML export. This is something else I hope the team will blog about in more detail down the road.

Flash Video is of course already broadly proliferated on the Internet. But until now Flash Video has been limited to specialized codecs that have had limited adoption on mobile devices, not much integrated HW acceleration, and not a great deal of choice iin software encoding tools. Now we can have the best of both worlds: seamless end-user experiences in Flash Player, and interoperability with a wide variety of video creation tools and device and PC HW-acceleration options. This announcement is also another strong demonstration of Adobe's commitment to the open standards community.

Adobe Digital Editions, our new application for reading and managing eBooks and other digital publications, is built on an extended Flash Player 9 runtime (in effect a precursor to Adobe AIR). Digital Editions 1.0 was just released in June, but we are already hard at work on an update to, among other things, localize to a number of languages. We decided some time back to synch our update with the impending "MovieStar" Flash Player dot release - but until today couldn't disclose one of the key underlying motivations. I believe the added benefit of H.264 video support definitely makes it worth the wait. Many publishers are eager to enhance learning and entertainment experiences by adding video to eBooks and other digital publications: the ability to choose a standards-based video encoding will be a big plus, and is consistent with Digital Editions native support of open standards PDF and EPUB.

The Google notice, found as page 1 on downloadable PDFs of public domain works available via Google Book Search, "asks" users to:

Make non-commercial use of the files. We designed Google Book Search for use by individuals, and we request that you use these files for personal, non-commercial purposes...

Maintain attribution The Google “watermark” you see on each file is essential for informing people about this project and helping them find additional materials through Google Book Search. Please do not remove it.

There is clear U.S. precedent that scanning a public domain work does not create a new copyright so there seems to be absolutely zero legal basis for restricting use or forcing users to preserve inserted per-page watermarks-cum-advertisements.

In previous email-list discussions some have argued that Google is only "asking" users to not do these things. Yet putting the above in a sternly-worded "Usage Guidelines" notice (containing phrases like "Keep it Legal") certainly makes it sound like it's intended to convey to users the impression of restricted rights. And it hasn't been entirely clear whether Google is claiming contract-based usage restrictions between it and users of Google Book Search.

So Google: which is it? If I make commercial use of one of these files or remove Google's watermark advertisements am I violating a contract with Google or otherwise breaking any laws (in which case terms like "ask" and "request" are disingenuous)? Or, am I not in violation of anything legally (in which case your current notice seems at least as misleading as anything being complained about)?

Personally I hope that the latter is Google's position and that, in the spirit of "do no evil" and to avoid undermining the FTC complaint it may be backing, Google will revise their notice to make it clear that it is perfectly legal for users to make commercial use of their files and/or remove their per-page watermarks.

My position is based on the principle that what's in the public domain must stay in the public domain. That a deep-pocket corporation chooses to pay for digitization is meritorious but doesn't give that corporation the right to dictate subsequent usage. If that company is the prevalent entry gate for discovery, and so can arrange that "its" copy of a work, rather than any other digitized copy, is the most widely utilized, the potential for undue corporate intrusion into the public domain is obviously even higher.

I found the presentation of digital reading, and reading-optimized devices as an integrated part of daily life, very compelling. Of course, this may be because it tracks very closely to how I see the future unfolding.

One thing that wasn't so compelling to me, at least in terms of the long-term vision, was the portrayal of digital content acquisition at the traditional "High Street" bookseller, via display copies of paper books. The idea of coming across a desired physical book and then instantly "beaming" the content to a personal device certainly sounds cool. But by the time digital books are widely adopted I believe that they will no longer be merely text and pictures - the integration of rich-media content and interactivity will ultimately make digital publications a new and distinct category of content, not merely a digitized version of paper. And after all most of us don't acquire songs for our MP3 players by going down to Tower Records and rummaging in CD racks. And online browsing of books is already here.

Yet there will surely be a transitional period where most books are still sold as paper products, and marketed in large part via bookstore display, and where most digital works still have essentially the same content as their paper editions. During this perhaps lengthy period integration of digital and paper bookselling may well transpire as portrayed. As someone who loves bookstores, I would like nothing more than to see things play out this way.

Digital Editions has many unique characteristics. The fact that we squeezed native PDF support, Flash support, and a consumer-friendly user interface into a 3MB download ought to be enough to turn some heads. But what I'm most excited about is that Digital Editions supports the new EPUB format in addition to PDF. EPUB (aka OPS), is an open standard, a reflowable XHTML-based format, packaged in a single-file container, that I believe will do for dynamic documents what PDF has done for paginated final-form documents. It will take a little while for publishers to fully adopt EPUB, but we've provided a key enabler by supporting one-button EPUB authoring for Digital Editions as a feature of the new new InDesign CS3. With PDF for final-form content and EPUB for "liquid" content that adapts to the user's display size and preferred font size, I believe we have achieved an open standard format platform that the industry as a whole will rapidly adopt, and finally end the "Tower of eBabel" of competing proprietary formats.

And as mobile devices become more and more prevalent, and as content needs to be sliced and diced and augmented in new and different ways that don't necessarily mach up with paper-like pages, I believe EPUB has the potential to be at least as important to the future of portable documents as today's PDF.

Getting back to the product, the commercial release of Digital Editions is a huge step forward from our Adobe Labs public beta releases. It adds support for bookmarks, highlights, and text notes (stored in an open XML format to facilitate future social networkign features), multiple bookshelves in Library view, and sports a reworked user interface that improves reading navigation, TOC display and addresses a host of issues. Publisher and content distributor support has been very strong.

The Labs beta process was definitely a tremendous accelerant - enabling us to engage with customers and partners and evolve the product much faster than a traditional shrink-wrapped software development cycle. We had close to 400,000 downloads during the 9 month process: a bit more than is probably ideal to experience the "first pancake off the griddle", especially when some of them were users who hadn't necessarily made an explicit decision to use not-ready-for-prime-time beta wares, but had simply upgraded to Reader 8 and therefore needed our Digital Editions companion software to read their eBooks. Certainly it's a very different way to deliver software to make 4 public releases over an 8 month period. But overall our users have been patient with us, and as a result the 1.0 release benefits from customer-feedback-driven changes that make it, in my mind, signficantly more mature than a typical 1.0 process. We probably were a bit too ambitious in the changes we decided to make from our beta to 1.0 - but I'm really impressed that the team pulled it off.

The 1.0 release is available for Mac (PPC & Intel native) and Windows (XP, Vista, and Windows 2000). And today at the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference we are also demonstrating a desktop Linux version that will be in public beta soon. Mobile/device support is also coming, as evidenced by our announcement today that Sony wil be incorporating Digital Editions capabiliities, including EPUB and Adobe DRM support, into the Sony Reader product line.

For those publishers who require DRM capabilities, we have also debuted a new hosted service for content protection, Adobe ADEPT. More later on ADEPT and all the issues around DRM. I also want to highlight the Flex-based development of Digital Editions, which in many ways is Adobe's first AIR (aka Apollo) style application. But that will also have to wait for another post.