A New Look for eBooks

By Kas Thomas

There's a surprising amount of debate on book-industry discussion lists these days about what an ebook should look and feel like. There are basically two camps. On the one hand there are those who say, in essence, this is a new medium and we have a rare opportunity to sit down and design the medium, from a clean sheet of (e)paper, to suit the needs of the audience (whatever those may be). Almost everybody in this group agrees that XML has to be the starting point for whatever format the industry ends up with. This is easy enough to agree with, since XML can mean anything to anybody. But that's where the agreement generally stops. Microsoft has some ideas about what an e-novel should look like (HTML tarted up with ClearType), but consensus has been slow to build.

The second group says: It is going to take a long time to hammer out an XML-based ebook format and get it adopted by millions of people, and certainly those who want to wait 18 months can go that way, but in the meantime there are plenty of paying customers out there who are willing to buy ebooks right now, today, in PDF format, so let's leverage off of the eight years Adobe has spent building the PDF platform (which already has 160 million viewers in place) and go ahead and launch a PDF-based ebooks industry.

The reason the XML apologists don't like PDF is that it supposedly doesn't give a satisfactory online reading experience. It's seldom really clear what the basis of this complaint is, however. When you ask, you tend to get a mishmash of non-answers: Some people don't like PDF's antialiasing of text (which is too blurry, apparently, for quite a few people), others complain about PDF's inability to reflow text (a la HTML) when the user wants a larger or smaller type size, some say the navigation experience is poor (although what that specifically means, I don't know), and there's always the raft of complaints about PDF's admittedly lightweight DRM provisions. (That's Digital Rights Management, in case you just tuned in.) But quite often, people who complain about the online viewing experience with PDF simply aren't articulate enough to explain what it is that bothers them. They shrug and say things like "PDF leaves me cold."

Warming Up the Look and Feel of PDF

It's never going to be possible to satisfy all readers all of the time, of course, but one entrepreneur who has an idea or two about how to "warm up" the ebook viewing experience is hoping to change a few minds about PDF. With the launch of BookVirtual.com, Adobe alumnus Patrick Ames is planning to inject warmth and conviviality into the ebook reading experience through a combination of features that should make ebooks more... well, more booklike (without giving up the obvious technical benefits of PDF).

Ames recently put up a public beta of his first BV demo at his http://www.bookvirtual.com site. The content chosen for the demo is particularly fitting: a poignant essay on the future of book publishing by legendary Random House editor Jason Epstein. It's a superb piece, well worth reading on its own merits.

If you haven't downloaded the BV demo, by all means take a moment to do it now (PDF 798K). (It requires Acrobat or Reader 4.0 or higher.) The file has some nice uses of popup menus and custom navigation features. Regardless of whether you agree with the overall approach, you'll have to admit, I think, that the BV treatment gives Epstein's piece a much different (and more satisfying, I think) look and feel, when read on a laptop, than the typical PDF ebook.

On his site, Patrick Ames articulates the BookVirtual credo this way:

    We believe paper books will never go away. Yet with the introduction of our digital book technology, a revolution is occurring that will affect the way we look at what books are. It is a shift in perspective similar to the advent of movable type and the introduction of printed books. BookVirtual will expand global access to information and create a completely new class of publications available to be read and enjoyed, to be saved and collected. We believe that digital books will henceforth play a fundamental role in furthering the intellectual scope of mankind. While paper books and digital books will live side by side for many decades, we see an incredibly large appetite for the features, convenience, portability, and art of the digital book. BookVirtual will lead development, application, acceptance, and longevity of the digital book.

It's too early to know how BV will do in the marketplace or whether traditional publishers who are rushing into the ebook market will take a breather from setting up OCR sweatshops in Mexico or Manila long enough to consider the aesthetic dimensions of ebook publishing. The business side of publishing has always been curiously at odds with the human side, and it's doubtful (particularly after reading Epstein's essay) whether the two will ever do more than merely coexist in a kind of strained interdiscliplinary dialectic. Traditional publishers already "don't get" PDF. How then are they supposed to "get" something like BookVirtual, which leverages PDF in a whole new way?

Here's hoping Ames can do the impossible: i.e., make traditional publishers look at PDF differently.

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