Howard Oakley
Before electronic books can take off, a universal format that can be read on different devices needs to be agreed and implemented.
It seemed a simple enough request: a well-illustrated history of painting that I can browse on both Mac and iPad. There’s no shortage of excellent printed books that would fit the bill, but it all gets a bit messy when you go electronic.
Amazon’s much-touted Kindle Store only operates from amazon.com, not amazon.co.uk, and despite its huge range of titles, it still concentrates on texts rather than colour illustrated volumes, as befits more restricted devices such as the Kindle. Understandably, the vast free Gutenberg library has a limited range of illustrated books, being drawn from an age when colour reproduction was limited. Unlike most other online eBook stores, WHSmith has a wide range of products that dare to have colour illustrations, from which I quickly bought nine titles published by Scala Vision; these are Adobe ADEPT-protected ePub (or PDF) titles that require Adobe Digital Editions, which being Flash-based is not available on iPad or Linux.
Thankfully, both the Mac and iPad boast a gamut of reader applications that ease this digital babel. Armed with Apple’s iBooks application, Amazon’s Kindle Reader, Stanza, and others, the iPad is something of a polyglot. But these are far from ideal: iBooks doesn’t play with protected ePub works, and while Stanza may be terrific value, it has its fair share of foibles, and can’t access the majority of protected books. For the moment, protected iBooks can’t be browsed on your Mac, meaning that you’ll need to buy two copies of each commercial book: one for your Mac, the other for your iPad. It’s a bit like having to buy one physical book that can’t leave the house, and another that you can only read when standing up.
DRM aside, the formats are a mess. PDF, the lingua franca for computer-readable documents, still suffers problems flowing content when browsed on smaller screens. When you create your own books for iPad, it’s worth avoiding, as existing conversion tools struggle most with PDF input. If you’re unlucky, you can waste hours trying to tag your PDF, or simply give up and convert it to HTML, which is much more amenable to conversion. ePub seems better suited to electronic books, and enjoys good support on the iPad. Lacking any major commercial proponent, though, its authoring tools are a motley crew, as detailed later in Mac Business (see p128).
Having long been a PDF evangelist, it doesn’t come easy to admit that it’s the wrong format for anything. With its plethora of different variants from PDF/A to PDF/X, this might seem unlikely, but the fundamental problem is its focus on appearance rather than structure and content of documents. If only Adobe had learned from Knuth’s LaTeX and Goldfarb’s SGML, we might have a truly generic tool. Instead, applications such as Word, when fed the wrong fonts, spit out words irrespective of paragraph structure, leaving you hundreds of pages over which to touch up the reading order.
Finally, electronic books bear VAT at full rate, unlike their paper counterparts. I presume this is because anything that’s downloaded is classed as software. How much longer can it be before HM Revenue & Customs deems books to be decorated processed timber and taxable accordingly?
