E-books, Formats, and Devices

I've been following with great interest the various device-and-format standards for indie pubishers / self-published authors. I'm predicting that the iPad will open up huge opportunities for small-press publications, doubling the sales of obscure, vertical and sort-of-out-of-print books – which is to say, if your Lulu-published guide to hamster grooming sold only 200 copies, you're about to sell another 200 copies on the iPad.

So gizmodo has a great field guide to the issues and challenges around open formats available for publishers here.

Okay, so the easiest way to put this in perspective is to quickly list what formats the major ebook readers support. (Why these four? Well, they're the ones due to sell over 2 million units this year, except for Barnes & Noble's, which we're including as a direct contrast to Kindle just because.)

• Amazon Kindle: Kindle (AZW, TPZ), TXT, MOBI, PRC and PDF natively; HTML and DOC through conversion
• Apple iPad: EPUB, PDF, HTML, DOC (plus iPad Apps, which could include Kindle and Barnes & Noble readers)
• Barnes & Noble Nook: EPUB, PDB, PDF
• Sony Reader: EPUB, PDF, TXT, RTF; DOC through conversion

You'll notice a pattern there: Everybody (except for Amazon) supports EPUB as their primary ebook format. Turns out, there's a good reason for that.

[...] The other path for digital publishers: Build an app to hold your books and magazines. This is the route magazines are taking, because they're envisioning some fancy digital jujitsu. With Adobe AIR, which is what Wired and the NYT are using in various incarnations for their respective rags, they're able to do more advanced layouts, more rich multimedia, Flash craziness, and other designer bling that EPUB can't handle, says Adobe's Bogarty. Also, importantly you can dynamically update content, like when new issues arrive, which you can't really do with EPUB.

Interestingly, the publisher Penguin is also taking the app route for their books, building apps using web technologies like HTML5 for the iPad, so their books are in fact, way more like games and applications than mere books. So it's another tack publishers could take...