As more high tech gadgets are coming out to transfer virtually everything in your daily life into the digital, the one tangible thing difficult to transfer completely to the other side is the printed book. A number of formats and companies have been trying though, and Adobe is no exception.
In the past, Adobe’s innovation has enabled the PDF format to remain in the digital pool of format usage. The format has certainly had its share of successfully turning millions of hard copy files into tiny little icons. But, this also goes for the e-book that can contain War and Peace in one single file.
And yet, while the PDF format and formats used for e-books are separated by a fine line, things are rapidly changing in the e-book industry to blur that line more than ever.
The E-book
With today’s digital lifestyle, it’s easy to see how the e-book is advantageous: it’s digital, portable, searchable, interactive and printable. An e-book is aimed at the user’s reading experience first and foremost, and has had one major advantage over the PDF format as an e-book—it reflowed textual content better. Also, e-publishers like Barnes & Noble.com, Peanut Press, and Amazon.com are big name publishers that make it easy for you to access all your favourites with the click of a mouse.
Technology wise, there are many reading devices and software applications that have been created to echo the printed book. MS Reader, Mobipocket, Palmreader, Hiebook—these are just a few of the e-Readers that you can find online. And with them, you can also find many miscellaneous, and some already obsolete, formats.
This was the major setback to emerge in the past—multiple e-book formats. You could have Word and Text documents, HTML, XML, PDF and not to mention the other formats specific to its corresponding e-book reader. Thus, the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), formerly the OEB Forum, developed the Open e-book (OEB) Format in response to the issue, a non-proprietary format based on XML.
It was based on the widely adopted Open e-book Publication Structure (OEBPS), a specification ultimately aimed at the regulation, conformance and uniformity that would reduce the number of formats that publishing companies have to pump out for every reader. These are aspects important to a long shelf life as publishers will go for the choice that means the least amount of cost and effort.
Open XML based open formats are still being developed into more advanced formats, such as the .epub format, by the IDPF group—a group of which Adobe is a current and participating member.
The PDF
By and large, you’ll agree that the PDF is the least desirable format as an e-book. The format is a final paginated format primarily used for printing and PostScript rendering, a format that wasn’t developed with textual reflow in mind in its early beginnings. It’s purpose was always beyond that of leisure reading. Until now.
Of course, the PDF has been used as an e-book format, and has done pretty well considering it was a format used for print publishing. Google’s e-book Search, for instance, has proven to be an example of effectively managing the PDF e-book on a large scale with such a widely used format.
However, the release of Digital Editions marks a change in Adobe’s PDF approach. A few years back Adobe had an Adobe Acrobat e-Reader, that was discontinued in 2003. The Digital Editions now available four years later is not focused so much on the PDF as a format for printing as it is for onscreen viewing.
With the latest tagging features of Adobe Acrobat, users can publish better PDFs with better textual reflow. This re-flow aspect is what makes the reading of PDFs or e-books go smoothly—pages can be flipped continuously and easily without any interruption. Hence, the PDF can now be enhanced for readability on mobile devices, screen readers and e-book readers.
Furthermore, PDFs used as an e-book can be protected with Adobe’s Digital Editions, which works in conjunction with Adobe Digital Editions Protection Technology (ADEPT), a hosted content protection service that guards publishers’ rights. Publishers have more incentive to use formats which Digital Editions can support.
Let’s not forget that Adobe is also keeping pace with the XML game. XML is supported within Digital Editions, as well as the new .epub format, making a seamless integration with XML e-books already out there. On a bigger scale, Adobe’s keeping up to date with its Mars Document, an XML representation file format, which will undoubtedly play a huge role in Adobe’s XML position in the future.
And as always, an aspect to factor in is that the PDF is an established de facto, soon to be ISO, standard. This fact goes a long way in securing users’ confidence in Adobe, the company, itself. It has an established consumer base on which to rely on.
Adding all of these points up, you could safely say that Adobe has neatly put itself in a good position to leverage the benefits and advantages of the e-book format and the e-book industry itself.
The Future
While you can’t make solid predictions on the exact role of the e-book in the PDF industry just yet, you can, however, make the solid observation that Adobe does have a knack for turning impending threats into long avenues for innovation.
So, is the e-book a threat to the PDF industry? Hmmm. . . . You make the call.
