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As noted elsewhere, the Poitin
Press is a virtual publishing house in that it sells its books
over the Internet both as printed and eBooks. Our reasons for us doing so are explained in "About
Us". In this section we would like to briefly explain the current
state of eBooks, what your options are, and what are the advantages and
disadvantages of each. The intent is to help you make your choice of which
is for you.
The Choices
Presently, there are several
different formats of eBooks. They fall into two basic categories:
Those that run on a computer such as a workstation or laptop, and those
that require a special device, often called an "eBook" but are
really a special-purpose computer in their own right. A third category
based on PDAs and similar hand-held devices is also available.
The Available Hardware
One interesting factoid is
that while the popularity of workstations is dropping, they are not being
replaced by "Internet appliances" as touted in the last few
years, or even PDAs, or the new "Tablets." By far and away, the
choice is still the combination of laptops and PDAs, which are generally
used in combination by today's cyber road-warriors. The PDA is used during
meetings and such and then downloaded into the laptop so that the
information can be gathered into spreadsheets, reports, and
presentations. This makes the laptop the hardware of choice for the
eBook marketers because the target customer is likely to already have one,
and so does not have to buy, support and cart around yet another bit of
hardware. For this reason, we have chosen to support only those eBook
formats that can run on a laptop. There are three such formats: Palm
eBook, Microsoft's
Reader, and Adobe's Acrobat eBook Reader. They are not compatible
with each other. They have fundamentally different technology in each and
one cannot display the other's format.
Overview of How eBooks Work.
Basically, all eBooks work the
same. You go to an Internet-based bookseller, order a book, download it
into your "reader" whatever it might be, and enjoy
reading. The issue is keeping people from then emailing hundreds if
not thousands of copies to everybody else. Thus the concept of
Digital Rights Management (DRM) comes to the forefront. The way DRM is
accomplished is for the bookseller to download the eBook to a
registered reader only. The procedure is basically as follows in the case
of laptop-based readers.
-
You go to the website of the
maker of the reader (see examples on How to
Order), and download the reader software into your laptop or workstation.
- You register the reader. There
are various ways of doing this, but the key in all of them is that
they take some unique information about your computer and send it back
to the registration site. In the case of both Acrobat eBook Reader
and Microsoft Reader, they use the volume header ID of your system
disk as well as other information such as CPU model. This means that
you cannot reformat your system drive should you have a disk problem, let
alone replace it, without having problems with your eBooks.
- You go to the bookseller's
site, order your book, and when it is ready for download, you
must download it to the laptop or workstation that has the registered
reader in it. The downloaded eBook is then stamped with a code that is used by the reader to decide if you have a legitimate copy of the
book or not.
There are many detailed variations in the above between the Adobe Acrobat Reader and the Microsoft
Reader. We urge you to go to their respective websites and read about them. Generally, as far as DRM is concerned, both Microsoft and Adobe
do a thorough job of preventing the improper copying of
eBooks.
The Palm DRM depends on just how much you
trust those you give the eBook to -- an interesting DRM concept (see
below).
How Microsoft Reader and Adobe
Acrobat Reader work
Given that you are not going to be making elicit copies of eBooks,
let's move on to the relative merits of the two laptop-based
readers. (You can also use them on your workstations, so don't panic if
you don't own a laptop!)
The Microsoft Reader is based on the Open eBook (OEB) forum. This
means that all the software and such – except for the DRM
part of it – is based on open standards. The basic technology is
HTML. The same as used in this web page. However, OEB upgraded the
features of HTML to XML. Special converters are available for making the
conversion from HTML to XML, so "typesetting" the eBook consists
of running HTML "text" through the converter and out pops an OEB
eBook. These are then loaded into the DRM software at the bookseller's
site, and sold to you. One very nice feature of the Microsoft Reader is
that Microsoft has added their ClearType™ technology that makes text
much more readable on the computer screen as well as the laptops LCD
displays, if the proper
fonts are use. Naturally, we do use them.
The Adobe Acrobat Reader is a straight forward extension of their very
popular PDF format. In fact, you use Acrobat 6.0 Distiller to
"typeset" the eBook. As in the case of the Microsoft Reader, the DRM
software is where all the copy protection is added. And like
Microsoft, Adobe has spent considerable effort to make reading eBooks more
pleasurable. In their case, they added special "sharpening"
software in their reader that works with special web fonts, which we also
use.
In addition to their special "readability" features, both
readers also have a "rotate" option that permits you to rotate
the image on the screen 90 degrees so you can turn your laptop on its side
and now have a long, narrow screen that looks more like a book
page.
How does Palm eBook
Reader work?
The Palm eBook is very different from the
other two in many ways. First, it lets you read your eBook on
several different platforms, including your PC and Palm PDA, and second,
once you purchase the eBook, you can copy it from one system to another,
back it up as you wish and even run it on several different systems, from
Macintosh, to PC, to PDA. And you can even give it to
friends. All you need is the credit card number that it was
originally purchased on, as well as the email address of who purchased
it. The credit card number is used as a "unlock"
code.
You got it, you have to give your credit
card number to anyone you "lend" the eBook to, which is to say
you are not likely to give it to anyone but your closest friends, and more
likely close family only. However, you have no limits on what you
personally do with the eBook, which is nice.
Which eBook Reader is for You?
The basic choice between them comes down to what you are using eBooks
for, and your personal tastes. Fundamentally, what you get with the
Microsoft Reader is a glorified web page. While very readable, the
formatting of your book will change as you adjust font size. Your 200-page
novel now becomes a 240-page novel when you select a larger font and the
quotation on page 10 may now be on page 12.
The Palm eBook is similar in look to the
Microsoft Reader, but is based on a text file with a mark-up language to
give it simple formatting. The advantage of this eBook is you can read it
on any platform you may have, and it will generally look good as far as
text is concerned. Pictures are another story, as they are very low resolution,
witness the cover for all our Palm eBooks, which are designed to be shown
on a PDA with 99 by 148 pixel resolution. So if the quality of
the pictures is important, then Palm is not for you, but the text is very
readable and clear.
On the other hand, the Adobe Acrobat Reader gives you something much
more like the traditional printed page. For example, if you download the PDF
for
the first chapters of our books, you will be getting the actual first
chapter of the Adobe Acrobat Reader version of that book. And since they
are not copy protected, you can load them into the Adobe Acrobat Reader
and see what you are getting before you buy. And page 10 remains page 10, no matter what
you do with the zoom control.
The implications of this are important: If you are working with a book
that has charts, figures and graphs, you will probably prefer the Acrobat
Reader. In addition, you have zoom controls that let you magnify
details of the charts and graphs. Likewise, kids will probably prefer the
Acrobat reader because of the richer-looking graphics and such.
On the other hand, the Microsoft Reader is much more space efficient.
Our typical novel is a 500 KB file in the Microsoft Reader version as
compared to about 2 MB in the case of the Adobe Acrobat Reader
version. Given that most laptops have several gigabytes of disk
space, this is not a storage issue, but the downloading time is about four
times as long.
Downsides
To be honest, as an eBook publisher, we
love the DRM features of eBooks. However, as readers, we're not so
enthusiastic. Examination of both Microsoft's and Adobe's website does not
make clear what happens if we have a disk problem and have to reformat the
system disk. Also, what about transferring the books from last
year's laptop to this year's? These are clearly issues, and they
will have to be resolved. At this time, Microsoft refers to a
section on "Reactivation" in the Guidebook that appears to have
been overlooked
in version 1.5 of the Microsoft Reader, while Adobe makes the following
statement:
"If you have any problems downloading or installing the
Adobe eBook Reader, please send e-mail to bugs@adobe.com or call our
toll-free Customer Support number 1-800-324-9113 (or 1-781-434-2000
outside the U.S. and Canada)."
These numbers appear to be manned only during normal business hours.
Another limitation we see is you cannot lend your eBooks to friends.
Clearly some sort of license transfer will have to be implemented. This
ties directly into the issues noted above.
On the other hand, the Palm format does
not have any of these problems. You can put the eBook on as many
computers, PDA, or other devices that have a reader, and read the same
book on all of them. And if you can trust someone with your credit card
number, you can lend the book as well.
Which do we prefer?
We are traditional book people, so we prefer the
traditional printed book. Basically, we are sorely
disappointed in the eBook in all of its variations. The big problem
is the DRM gets into the way for too many people, including
us. The major fault is you can't lend an eBook to a friend
like you can lend the paper version. In addition, if your
computer is zapped by virus, the printed book is still on the shelf,
waiting for you to pick it up and hold it in your hand.
This is the reason we have switch
from eBooks only, to being a printed book publisher. And it
has been rewarding. Until 2006, over 90% of our sales are with the traditional
printed books. However, this has changed in the last six
months, with more and more of our sales coming from the eBook
versions. Price is certainly an issue as we can price the eBooks at
a far lower price because we do not have to pay for the printing costs of
the POD book. However, POD sales are still 70% of our income, and we
will continue to offer them to those of you who want them.
On the other hand, we are following the SONY eBook Reader with great enthusiasm. It offers a 170 DPI
screen, which is a far higher resolution than any other device on the
market. While still priced in the $400 price range, we expect this
reader and others like it to become the new eBook platform of choice in
the near future.
© Copyright 2003, 2006 Poitin Inc. All rights reserved.
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