In his description of how Make is taking the Sony Librie for a spin, Phil Torrone makes an important point: “Sony, Amazon and the iLiad eReader from iRex all use the same hardware/specs/tech – this is good thing.” He’s absolutely right. Standardized hardware was the beginning of the PC revolution, as it allowed multiple vendors to compete on the software stack (at least for a while :-)
Another interesting point came in follow-up discussion on the O’Reilly editors’ list. Xavier Cazin wrote:
I wish those readers were immune to shocks, folding, coffee, sand or scratches, like a real book. Building an armoured Sony reader would be a cool Make project ;-)
Mike Loukides added: “Yes, I’m really surprised at how “nobody gets it”. I was saying a good ten years ago that for electronic readers to take off, we’d need a device with no holes in it: nowhere for liquids, sand, etc. to get in. These days, we could easily make a device like that. If you do all your I/O over Bluetooth or Wifi, you don’t even need a physical data port. (With EVDO in Amazon’s reader, they’ve clearly thought about it, though not in the right way.) About the only “hole” you can’t do away with would be the power cable (or the battery compartment), and those can be sealed if you do it right.”
This is an interesting point, though I’m not sure that eBook readers need to be any more rugged than cell phones, digital cameras, or digital music players, all of which have succeeded despite some degree of vulnerability to the vicissitudes of life. What I think has been holding the eBook market back is the lack of content. No device has gotten enough traction to inspire authors and publishers to develop content for them, and the device manufacturers haven’t given enough thought to the ways that standardization drives the market.
When we began our work with eBooks back in the late 1980s, we started by developing a standard format — DocBook — and a focus on creating a large enough body of content to make using an eBook (or eBook service) worthwhile for a targeted market. We also thought about what job a book does, and realized that Javascript: The Definitive Guide and Harry Potter are not really the same type of product at all. Because much of the use of our books is for reference, we built Safari as a service that is optimized for search across multiple books, rather than simply trying to create an electronic copy of a print book. We also chose to use the web as the delivery mechanism rather than specialized eBook software because we wanted to use standardized software wherever possible.
In short, we need standardized hardware, standardized software, and standardized document formats. And then we need publishers to get their books into those formats. Ideally, publishers will keep their content in a flexible repository that will allow them to output a variety of standard formats. At O’Reilly, we go from DocBook XML to postscript for printing, to HTML for Safari, to PDF for downloads, and to DAISY and BRL for visually impaired readers.