13/02/08
Free: PDF vs. MP3?
In among all the recent interest in free I wanted to pick up on something I mentioned in passing (I think during a question) at RRO a couple of weeks back.
We have an increasingly broad range of options these days for electronic reading devices - be it the basic (phone, computer), dedicated (Kindle, Sony Reader), or phantom (iPhone / iBook etc).
But as publishers continue to founder around digitisation, formats, DRM and the like, we have a disconnect between the demand and supply of electronic files to go on these devices. Without a single, unified offering for content in the right formats (and at the right price) then where can readers go to get their writing?
They’ll go anywhere. If we look back to the birth of the MP3 platform, then it was very hard to get music in that format without resorting to “free” (or rather, pirate) sites. Napster was pretty much unchallenged from the late nineties until the launch of iTunes in 2003, which itself took a while to get the market share it has.
As a result, music fans - who really did want to get access to their music collections in the new format - flocked to illegal services, arguably because the industry couldn’t supply them with something that the community (who were ripping and sharing their own collections) could. (And the music business is still feeling the price of it: I heard a statistic on the radio the other day suggesting that for every song bought, five are downloaded illegally.)
And so it struck me that seeing as the most common file for distributing “books” in is either Word or PDF (but particularly PDF as it’s also used for grouping scanned images of pages as found on pirate sites) there is a valid parallel to that of MP3, which was a brilliant compression format. Compression isn’t so much of an issue in books, given that text is usually very lightweight, and that we have lots more bandwidth than we did 10 years ago. But the PDF is the format of choice for fans to share pirated books among themselves - and as such, could be tarnished as the perfect vehicle for transmitting pirated ebooks?
It’s a bit of a weak question really, I suppose. Of course it’s the perfect vehicle. That is what it was built for, it just hasn’t been adopted in quite the way Adobe possibly hoped, other than in the printing business.
But I wonder what comes next from the industry? Perhaps there really is a covert, unified, rallying movement under way from the conglomerates that will come out with a single channel (perhaps, say, a competitor to Amazon / audible) and in a month’s time, we’ll be astonished by the vision, prescience and execution by a troubled business of a way to draw hope from its future?
Or perhaps (should such an insatiable demand actually exist, and I can’t say we’ve been shocked by recent images of angry readers waving Kindles on the streets outside corporate publishing house head offices, demanding ebooks) we’ll see something else. Imagine if hackers got into the archives of one of the printers and “liberated” all those poor PDFs to go back into the wild, among readers, where they’d be happiest?
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# Comment by Alex @ 8:49 am, February 13, 2008:
I hope pdfs aren’t adopted. Pdfs are (by their very name) a print defined format. And who wants to print out 400 pages of A4 in order to read an ‘electronic’ book? The problem with pdfs is that they are pre-formatted to a specific page size. All the display characteristics are locked down in the pdf.
Pdfs that are set up for A4 can be unreadable on small (smaller than A4) screen devices. A scaled down pdf often renders at a very low quality on most devices (you still end up with unnecessary margins without manual trimming) and the on-the-fly processing is very intensive. The file bloat with embedded vector and font information is also often only really appropriate to the printed copy.
The ideal ’standard’ format would be an minimal markup of plan text. All you need is line breaks, basic formatting (bold, italic etc), indexable headings and chapter breaks.
Although there should be a suggested font face (for print versions and the typesetters), this should be configurable so that the font-face, size, line height, justification etc can all be controlled by the device used to read the book.
There are a few apps which take pdfs and rip out the raw data to make them accessible to all (rastafarian for example). Continued improvements in these applications is our best hope to liberate the lovely content locked within those restrictive pdfs.
# Comment by Peter Collingridge @ 8:59 am, February 13, 2008:
@Alex
I agree - PDF is pretty poor. I hate reading (or trying to read) PDFs on my phone.
Do you know much about how “illegal” books are being distributed; i.e. Gutenberg (which I know is legal, obviously) is great at using text, how are the pirates and hackers distributing? What other formats are there that you’ve seen that you do rate. Other than print and paper ;) ?
# Pingback by Free: PDF vs. MP3?-Music Mp3 Download @ 7:31 pm, February 15, 2008:
[…] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptIf we look back to the birth of the MP3 platform, then it was very hard to get music in that format without resorting to “free” (or rather, pirate) sites. Napster was pretty much unchallenged from the late nineties until the launch of … […]
# Pingback by Times Emit: Why Agents Need Good Websites @ 4:59 pm, March 31, 2008:
[…] It’s all good that there is lots of debate being reported about piracy, future models, and other “big” issues. But the failure (to the best of my knowledge) of the industry to make any real progress on the ground, such as to define even what a fair royalty on a digitally sold book should be, doesn’t bode well for the actual, day-to-day implementation of “digital issues”. If they don’t hurry up and sort out digital rights, then there is a real danger of the digital book going the way of the song. […]