Rainblog

It's time for a unified ebook format and the end of DRM

Joe Wikert calls for platform lock-in and DRM-encoded ebooks. I agree with everything he says, but I don’t see the situation changing any time soon.

Today Apple released its new iBooks Author software, a free authoring tool to allow writers to create books for iOS devices such as the iPad. Sounds nice, but there’s a little catch hidden (and I do mean hidden) in the EULA. Books - in Apple’s new proprietary format - created using the tool may only be sold through Apple’s iBookstore.

I don’t like proprietary formats and lock-ins. I resist buying books from Amazon because their engineered lock-in forces you to read the books in Amazon’s Kindle software, which isn’t as good as some other e-readers (such as Stanza, which Amazon bought to kill). Given my choice, I’d rather buy books in the open and widely-supported ePub format. I’d like to see everyone follow the lead of O’Reilly, who offer their titles in 4 or 5 formats, unprotected by DRM, and trust in the honesty of their buyers.

I’d hoped that we might move in that direction, and that before long I’d be able to buy books from the vendor of my choice in the format of my choice and read them with the reader of my choice.

Apple, it seems, may have other ideas.  

Stanza's swan song

The popular ebook reader, Stanza, has now been updated for iOS 5, but new owner Amazon says that this is the last update.

I stopped using Stanza, formerly my reader of choice, because it was unusable on iOS 5. In its place, I started to use Apple’s iBooks, which turns out to be a remarkably capable and polished reader. I’m downloading the new Stanza update, but I’m not sure I’ll go back to Stanza.

Like the lady said, “you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone”. iOS 5 seems to signal the end of the line for Lexcycle’s excellent free ebook reader, Stanza. Stanza was mostly solid on iOS 4, but if you run it on iOS 5, it vomits error messages and dies.

There’s not much hope of a fix, because Lexcycle has been acquired by Amazon, who have an e-reader of their own and small interest in developing a competitor. Kindle for iOS is fine in its way, but it’s no Stanza. 

Incidentally, I seem to be running into this purchase-and-kill a lot lately. Another of Amazon’s victims was online music store Amie Street, which Amazon bought up and promptly closed. Similarly, Getty Images has taken over free stock photo site stock.exchange. The site still proclaims itself to be “the leading free stock photo site”, but this is apparently some interesting new meaning of ‘free’ that actually means ‘give us all the money’, because as far as I can tell nothing about the site is free at all. But I digress.

So, no more Stanza. Alternatives that I’ve looked at so far include the Kindle app (free) iBooks (free), the Chinese-made ShuBook (ad-supported, or $1.99 through in-app purchase), Bluefire (free), and GoodReader ($4.99). Two I haven’t tried are i2Reader ($4.99) and MegaReader ($1.99), which both get mixed reviews.

ShuBook fell at the first fence when it choked on the first ePub that I fed it. It’s also designed according to what I think of as a common Chinese aesthetic, which says that something isn’t beautiful until looking at it makes your eyes bleed. Look at a Chinese newspaper sometime and you’ll see what I mean. It’s not just that being an ignorant gweilo I can’t make sense of it, it’s that every morsel of space must be packed with information and, preferably, bright colors as well. So, ShuBook goes.

GoodReader doesn’t do ePub at all (but it stays on my iPod because it does an awesome job of displaying PDFs). Kindle doesn’t like ePub either: I could probably feed it .mobi versions of the books that I’m interested in, but it’s not particularly special as an eBook reader, and it doesn’t have the ability to group books into categories: you end up paging through one long list.

So the two front-runners seem to be Bluefire and, amazingly enough, iBooks. Bluefire does a nice job of displaying eBooks; it’s responsive and crisp, seems stable, and it’s free. You can also download content in-app from Feedbooks (my favorite free bookstore). The downside is that, like the Kindle app, there’s no way to organize books into sets.

iBooks has a strike against it because of its hideous and space-consuming faux bookshelf interface. I assume this was the brainchild of whoever was also responsible for the fake leather travesty imposed on iCal and Address Book in OS X Lion. I don’t know who it was, or why the perfectionist Steve Jobs signed off on these abominations, but they need to go. My hope is that at some point Jony Ive will walk whoever was responsible behind the Apple Store and put a swift, merciful iBullet in them, so Apple can go back to designing interfaces that work, rather than interfaces that oh my God, it looks just like a real bookshelf, isn’t that the cutest thing?

Anyway, despite its ugly UI, iBooks has some real strengths. You can display your books as a relatively unadorned list, hiding most of the nastiness of the fake bookshelf. It handles PDFs, categories, and user-managed collections. Display is quick and crisp. It has bookmarks, table of contents features, direct control over brightness, and search, both within collections and books. Somewhat to my surprise, I’m finding that iBooks may actually be the best alternative to Stanza out there.

So iBooks is going into the coveted spot on my homescreen formerly occupied by Stanza, and Stanza is being removed (forever?) from my iPod. So long, Stanza, and thank you.

From ‘amazon.com’, showing why not everything can be an ebook.