Will There Ever Be A Universal, MP3-Like Standard For E-Books? - (No, that's not a typo)

Will There Ever Be A Universal, MP3-Like Standard For E-Books?

Digital music is now mainstream, thanks in part to the MP3. Will the e-book market be next to produce a one-size-fits-all formatâ€"a format that is universally readable, freely sharable, and with a reasonably good reproduction quality?

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The answer to this question, for at least in the foreseeable future, is: not bloody likely.

Let’s start with the fact that MP3 itself is not all that it’s cracked up to be. It’s the lingua franca of ripped CDs and copyright infringement, but not of legitimate commercial music distribution. Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) supports MP3 with iTunes/iPod/iPhone, but not as its actual distribution format: Apple uses MPEG-4 AAC as its primary codec. AAC has better sound quality than MP3 at a given bit rate but doesn’t play seamlessly on some portables. Streaming services like Spotify and Rhapsody use different codecs altogether.  The biggest MP3 retailer in the U.S. is Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), with only 10 percent of the downloaded music market as of April 2011.  It’s fair to say that none of the current growth in commercial digital music distribution is MP3-based, and it’s likely to stay that way.  If you’re talking about paid content in music, you aren’t really talking about MP3s.

With that out of the way, let’s look at digital book content.  It’s readable in plain ASCII text format, which is decades old and completely interoperable across devices.  Yet there is no market for ASCII book content (in spite of attempts since the mid-90s), for various reasons but mainly because of its poor reproduction quality.  And Adobe’s ubiquitous PDF is not well suited for today’s wide variety of digital devices because of its orientation towards printed pages and facsimiles thereof.

Right now, two e-book content formats vie for supremacy: Amazon’s proprietary markup format and EPUB, an open standard created by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), formerly known as the Open e-Book Forum.  Both of these are straightforward markup languages with tags for paragraph, chapter heading, bold, italics, etc.  It’s possible to translate from one to the other with minimal loss of fidelity, but they are different formats.  And in most cases, they are both encrypted using different DRM schemes: Amazon uses its own, while most other e-books are marked up in EPUB and encrypted using Adobe’s DRM.

From the consumer’s perspective, the ideal would be a format that: preserves the look and feel of print typography; is readable (“reflowable”) on all types of devices; imposes no restrictions on copying or sharing; and is available from a variety of retailers. Well, it’s even more unlikely to exist (legally) for e-books than it does for music.  EPUB was designed to be for e-books what MP3 is for music.  But first of all, the MP3 codec pre-existed the digital music market by several years, while EPUB came out in 2007, the same year that Amazon launched the Kindle and several years after the first wave of e-readers hit the market.  Secondly, EPUB does not have any serious technological advantages over other contemporaneous formats such as Amazon’s MOBI format, whereas MP3 had the advantage of compressing music files so that they could be sent to and from Internet sites over the then-prevalent dialup connections. In other words, there was no standard on which the e-book industry could build. Finally, recall that there isn’t really a significant commercial market for MP3s anyway.

Thus the legitimate e-book market will develop as any other technology market does: through competition.  Competition results in one of two things: a dominant vendor with great customer acceptance, or vibrant competition with sub-optimal interoperability.  Techies who have been around for a while know this to be true.

Many tech markets settle down to a long-term state of two or three players.  In operating systems, there’s Windows and Mac OS (desktops and laptops); Android, iOS and BlackBerry OS (portables); and Linux and Windows (servers).  The web browser market has the triumvirate of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) (Internet Explorer), Google (NSDQ: GOOG) (Chrome), and Mozilla (Firefox).  Other markets settle down to a single player whose dominance is tempered by a combination of legal constraints and consumer annoyance: currently Microsoft in office applications; Facebook in social networking; Intuit in personal finance software; and Apple in digital music.

Right now, the e-book industry is nearing a tipping point. Amazon has a marketshare of 58 percent (as of February 2011), while the Adobe/EPUB axis (Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS), Sony (NYSE: SNE), and others) claim a total of about 33 percent.  (Apple’s iBooks is a distant third at 9 percent.)  That’s not bad for Amazon, but it’s not like Apple’s digital music market share.  Two things could happen: Amazon could pick up steam and move into Apple/music territory, or Barnes & Noble â€" or someone else â€" could gather momentum and reduce Amazon to perpetual-competitor status.