The Future of Documents

After the ODF-OOXML was, here comes another potential Format War – this time for e-Books: “Format War Clouds E-Book Horizon“, titles the Wall Street Journal.

Most major e-book stores have used  proprietary formats, but Sony’s recent move towards ePub might change the game. Although its devices (and others, e.g. the iLiad)  have supported the format for a long time, Sony Store e-books were offered in their proprietary format until now.

However, Sony will still be using DRM – using Adobe’s Content 4 proprietary solution. Which might run against Amazon’s own standard, if it gains traction. So much for a real open “standard”.

Kindle Review has its own interesting view about this article – stating that this format war might be a bit “overhyped”. They cite a survey where format concerns were only a very secondary issue.  format extremely important, and 25% consider it important.

However, I feel their viewpoint might be a bit Kindle-centric this time (maybe because Kindle is not in Europe yet!).   Portability and interchange, as we’ve learnt the hard way for Office Documents, are very important – and need to be established as soon as possible. In fact, their own poll indicates their reader tend to agree – 35% of respondents believe an open format is extremely important, and 25% consider it important.

 The broader question (or problem) might be DRM for e-books – a standard format is worthless if DRM blocks it. Why not abandon them altogether, like the music industry did?

Sony announced a deal with Google to bring over 600,000 classic books to the Sony Digital Book. These books come from the Google Books project, and only cover those books whose copyrights have expired (published before 1923).

Google has scanned around seven million books over the last few years, creating one of the largest digital libraries in the world. These books are, for most of them, searchable, and includes cool features like Google Maps hyperlinking to locations mentioned in the document, or automatic summarization.

These books could previously be downloaded as PDF and viewed on good e-Readers with PDF support; but this partnership is a major step forward for ePub, an open, XML-based standard for e-Books.

 Lots of good content available for free – makes the 250,000 books from the Kindle library look small.

Fujitsu’s FLEPia, the first color ePaper device, is now on sale. Only available in Japan, it sells for a bit over $ 1000, which is quite high. However, the specs are quite impressive: 8 inch screen, 260K colors, Wifi, Bluetooth, SD card and miniUSB support – not to mention a touch-screen. It can go for 40 hours without a recharge (estimated to be around 2400 page turns, as it only requires power for page re-draw). Just like the Kindle, it connects very nicely into the Number 1 Japanese e-book server.

As Wired points out, this device sounds like more of a convergence between e-books and PDAs, since it is powered by Windows CE 5. You will therefore be able to run many applications on this device like email, simple electronic document editing, web browsing etc… this makes the price tag a bit more acceptable.

Anyway, a device that should go a long way into making e-Paper an integral part of the Future of Documents. 2009 might very well be the year for ePaper after all.

My biggest question is, does color (at least the kind of color it can render) really make a difference for e-Readers? I am not sure about the contrast and quality, which has improved by a factor 1.5 from these pictures. Still, I am pretty sure it will be far from its paper competitor- the glossy and shiny magazine. The gap between paper and electronic will be much more noticeable than for Black and White documents.