Microsoft Reader's Bigger Picture?Microsoft Reader's Bigger Picture?

An interesting article from Inside contributor Jimmy Guterman raises a more significant reason than just the emerging ebook market for Microsoft's MS Reader release -- apparently Adobe Acrobat is the more immediate target. See Microsoft Reader Promises to Do a Lot More for Microsoft Than for Readers for the piece at Inside.

The piece doesn't have a lot to support itself -- but when has that ever got in the way of pieces that do make you speculate about what large and competing software companies are planning behind closed doors? Currently there are so many differences and similarities between where Microsoft Reader and Adobe Acrobat are that it's hard not to jump into the argument.

According to Jimmy Guterman, "for now, (Microsoft) Reader may be the first step in a concerted effort to force a de facto file-format standard, which is what's really important to the businesses that are core clients of Adobe and Microsoft. The documents that matter to these companies are the documents that businesses share."

Perhaps the point he makes is reasonable enough? The two document formats most shared currently would have to be Word (DOC) and PDF, and most PDFs probably begin their lives in Word. Adobe have certainly done well by making it very easy for MS Office users to get their files into PDF, but the reasons why users are converting their files are not really addressed. People are using PDFs in the business environment but for different reasons than those for using PDF in the ebook environment.

Going on the latest versions of the two competing 'de facto file-format standards' (LIT and PDF), it appears that Microsoft hasn't really done a particularly good job of matching Adobe. Perhaps in its rush Microsoft was unable to include some of the core functionality that Word and Acrobat 'business users' have grown used to, and it's for this reason it seems more likely that Microsoft are targeting ebook users more for the first version.

Microsoft's marketing focus on ClearType and the way the Reader makes it very difficult to copy and extract info from the file makes it a far more likely candidate for ebooks arena over the business world.

It seems clear that Microsoft Reader 1.5 is based on keeping the LIT file and all content related to it online and inside the LIT file. The way Acrobat and PDFs are used between business users is a whole lot different to this. For starters a typical business user of Acrobat when creating and distributing a PDF would not:

  • encrypt the document in any way,
  • make it hard for the user to extract text, annotations and images from the document,
  • disallow copying privileges, or
  • disallow printing privileges

These are the types of measures one would take when trying to protect the IP (intellectual property) contained in a document -- the functions that are built into Microsoft Reader and are a natural deterrent to a typical business user, but not necessarily an ebook user.

What a typical business user wants is not necessarily what an ebook user wants

So what would a typical business user want?

  • a surety that the document can be opened by anyone on any platform, and that it will look and print the same on each of these
  • to be able to print all or parts of the document. After all, business users are the most likely users to print a copy of a document to read offline -- Microsoft Reader doesn't allow you to print, quite possibly for the reason that it automatically restricts one way in which copyrighted material can be abused.
  • for the process of exchanging and accessing to be easy. Business users typically exchange documents that are regularly unsecure, and the can be modified, marked-up and annotated. This is contrary to Microsoft Reader on the whole, which traps all this content inside the LIT file, making it far hard to repurpose any content. Acrobat *can* allow the user print and copy control, as well as the ability to summarize, export and import annotations.

For all this discussion about Acrobat may look may make it appear as though Microsoft Reader doesn't cut it in the ebook space, but this isn't the case. Some of the point raised above that are good for business users are the very things that have scared publishers away from publishing ebooks, and things likely to encourage ebooks reaching us readers.

Perhaps the 'business user' features will come with Microsoft Reader 2.0?