That looks set to change as an influential magazine standards group, the IDEAlliance, has thrown its weight behind the development of the next generation ePub, the standard adopted by book publishers for ebooks.

Speaking at the Magazine Publishers of America’s Dimensional to Digital conference last week, Dianne Kennedy, vice president of Media Technologies at IDEAlliance said her organisation was working with the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) to bring rich media and magazine content to the ePub standard.

IDEAlliance is the group behind PRISM, the XML standard for magazine and journal metadata.

The book industry’s ePub standard is widely supported by device manufacturers, publishers and distributors.  Convergence with the magazine and newspaper industries would make a lot of sense for publishers, consumers and device manufacturers.

While ePub currently lacks some features that are important to magazines, its general approach based on XML and web technologies including HTML and CSS is very sound. Combined with its widespread support among device manufacturers and industry heavyweights Apple and Google, it offers a good foundation for digital magazines.

The standard will also be developed “with an eye to advertising”, says Kennedy, another key feature for magazines.

The working group hopes to have the first draft of a standard published by September 2010.

Among the 14 goals that the IDPF’s working group has identified for the next ePub specification, currently designated ePub 2.1, several are particularly important to magazines:

Need for rich media and interactivity support.

Need for enhanced article support. The fundamental atomic unit of magazines and newspapers is the article … it is desirable to support a work flow where PRISM content can be delivered as EPUB.

Need for a means to convey page-level layouts and target multiple display surface sizes in a single publication.  … This is a barrier to supporting books with more complex information designs, as well as digital magazines …

Currently there is no mechanism to identify and include advertising in publications, which is required in several markets.

For more, see this article from eMedia Vitals.

Google Editions’ approach will differ in a couple of significant ways from current outlets including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and Apple.

First, Google will be operating both a retail and a wholesale model. The latter will reportedly allow even small independent booksellers to get into the ebook retailing space with a large catalogue of ebooks, something that is today beyond the technical and logistics capabilities of most booksellers.

The second big difference is that Google plans to use the standard web browser for its reading platform and the ebooks themselves will reside “in the cloud” on Google’s servers. This means they’ll be readable by any device that supports a web browser instead of just a narrow group of reading devices supported by a particular online retailer. Another advantage of this approach is that it will not require cumbersome DRM (digital rights management) to prevent copying. Google’s system will, however, still support offline reading via a temporary version of the ebook in the browser’s local cache.

For the emerging digital content industries, this could be an interesting case study in the use of new technologies being built into modern web browsers such as HTML5, the latest version of the technology that underpins the worldwide web. If Google is able to deliver a sophisticated “web app” with features and a user experience that compete with dedicated software such as iPhone and iPad apps, it will give a big boost to the use of open web standards as a way to get content onto the new breed of mobile devices. This will be especially welcome in view of Apple’s recent bad behaviour.

There’s no word yet of which publishers will be likely to support Google Editions but it’s hard to see Google having much trouble attracting publishers who will welcome more competition and Google’s plans to make ebook selling accessible to smaller players. Through it Partner Program which drives the Preview feature of Google Books search, Google already has access to a big share of the world’s publishers.

Google Editions is separate from the Google Book Search programme which has landed Google in hot water through its attempt to digitise millions of the world’s books without rightsholder permission. The company says that Google Editions, which will sell commercially available ebooks, will launch regardless of the outcome of the Google Books Settlement.

Billed as “the world’s first touch-enabled read-along colour story book”, a feature of the system is that it highlights the text as it reads aloud, each word zooming out as it’s spoken. The reader can tap on any word to have it highlighted and spoken back or spelled.

It’s similar to the increasingly popular Scrollmotion system but with more sophisticated handling of the read-along text. The QBook also includes a puzzle, colouring and the ability to record your own dialogue.

Among the features listed by the company are:

• Personalize each book with ‘this book belongs to …
• Swipe-to-Read™ to highlight and playback the story at your own pace
• Touch-to-Hear™ individual words spoken
• Touch-to-Spell™ to hear the letters that spell each and every word
• Auto Play to enjoy the narration
• Use the iRead™ Function to read and record the story yourself and customize your book
• Use the Colour Palette to paint each page and save this to customize your book
• Choose the Easy/Hard Word Find puzzle to find words from the story
• Choose the Easy/Hard Memory Pairs game and match the picture card pairs
• Save your high scores and advance up the levels

There’s a free app demo version of a Penguin title, Seb’s Tail, as well as the full version for NZ$6.49 / US$4.99, the same price as the Milly Molly title. You’ll find the titles by searching the App Store for Kiwa Media.

Sounds like more than a mouthful but this is very good news for ebook development. It potentially opens up the important iPhone channel to content from major commercial publishers who, love it or hate it, won’t release their books without DRM.

The ePub/Adobe Content Server 4 DRM combination is the system we’re planning to use in New Zealand for our 1000 Great New Zealand eBooks promotion and it is the one that is widely viewed as the best shot we have in the short term to create an open standard for ebooks, ‘open’ in the sense that will operate on many devices and can be sold or rented through many retail  channels.

Of course, this is bleeding edge technology so nothing is meant to be simple. Txtr is a German company — one to watch, by the way — and right now you can’t install their app in New Zealand or, I imagine, in most other countries, mainly because of various rights issues.

The important news, though, is that they’ve actually ported Adobe’s mobile reader SDK (software developer kit) to the iPhone and built an App with it that’s met Apple’s approval.

Will leading iPhone e-reading app Stanza soon add Adobe’s mobile reader technology?

The NZETC is afilliated to Victoria University in Wellington and has been busy digitising works of historical and literary interest for several years.

According to Project Manager Jason Darwin, they had been following the ebook market’s development closely and decided the time was right to jump in and help. They made the excellent decision to convert their collection to the ePub format.

NZETC had already been storing their texts in an XML format for online viewing so it was a relatively straightforward step to convert them to the ePub format using an automated system, says Darwin.

Like any automated system, they won’t have the finesse of a carefully hand-crafted book but they are perfectly fine and readable. I’ve just downloaded My Life by Jean Batten to my iPod Touch. It’s great to have such a wealth of New Zealand material now to enjoy.

Epub is the same format that commercial New Zealand publishers are planning to use so it greatly expands the available market here. And there are some real classic gems. Here’s just a small sampling:

• The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield
• The Life of Captain James Cook by J C Beaglehole
• My Life by Jean Batten
• The Story of a New Zealand River by Jane Mander
• Man Alone by John Mulgan
• The Godwits Fly by Robin Hyde
• Coal Flat by Bill Pearson
• The Maori Volumes I and II by Elsdon Best
• The New Zealanders at Gallipoli by Colonel Fred Waite
• The ‘Sure to Rise’ Cookery Book, third edition, 1914 [the Edmonds Cookbook that your great Gran used]

You can browse the whole list by title or by author. Note that the site is still being worked on and some pages are a bit slow to load so be patient.

How to access the downloadable ePub editions

The best ways are:

• An ebook reader that supports the ePub format if you’re lucky enough to have one
• iPhone or iPod Touch**, eg by using the Stanza ebook reader
  • go to the App Store on your iPhone, search for “Stanza” then install the free app
  • In Stanza, go to the Online Catalog
  • Tap the ‘+’ in the bottom right of the Online Catalog.
  • Choose ‘Add Web Page’
  • Type in “New Zealand Texts Collection” for name and “http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-corpus-misc.html” for the URL
  • Go into the New Zealand Texts Collection custom catalog and browse for a book you want to download
  • From the Detailed Book Info page, tap the EPUB link.  This will start the download right into Stanza.
  • Note that you’ll need to be online, either your cellphone connection or in range of a WiFi connection
  • See below for details of how to find the URL for the ebook you’re interested in
• Your PC or Mac after downloading Adobe Digital Editions.
  • You download the ebook file, eg to your “My Ebooks” folder in My Documents if you’re a PC user
  • See below for details of how to find the URL for the ebook you’re interested in
  • Start Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) the click on the Library link and then Add Item to Library, and select the ebook file you’ve just downloaded

How to locate the ebook file you want to download

Find the title you want, either by browsing the list by title or by searching. On the right hand side, there’s an information panel. Look under “Other Formats” for the ePub logo.

And remember, we’re all pioneers. It will get easier:-)

Thanks to the team at NZETC for this terrific initiative.

** The Stanza instructions have been updated from the original post. Thanks to Neelan Choksi from Lexcycle for pointing out a much better system than mine. Sometimes, it pays to read the manual.

The new hardware announced today was the Sony Reader Daily Edition, a larger format (18 cm/7-inches wide) reader with wireless connectivity that Sony is clearly hoping will provide an entree into the newspaper and magazine markets. It’s expected to ship in December (US only at this stage). [Update 28 August: Sony UK has indicated the Daily Edition may take "a year or two" to reach the UK. Not much immediate hope for us downunder, then.]

Like the larger format Amazon Kindle DX and the forthcoming clipboard-sized e-reader from Plastic Logic, it’s also likely to make an impact on the textbook and business document markets.

You can see a leaked, I presume unofficial, picture here showing the new US$399 Reader Daily Edition lined up with the two new Sonys released earlier this month, the US$199 PRS-300 Pocket edition and the US$299 touchsreen Touch edition. (Thanks to Teleread for the sleuthing.)

Today’s announcements were made at the New York Public Library, highlighting another sector, libraries, that Sony intends to cosy up to.

And a third group, independent booksellers, also lined up behind Sony. About 200 of them have signed on to resell the Sony hardware and to support the open ePub-formatted books that Sony is hoping to popularise in opposition to Amazon’s proprietary Kindle. The indies will fire up their ebook stores later this year using a shared turn-key system called IndieCom that’s been developed by the American Booksellers Association.

The technology behind Sony’s new push is a combination of the open ePub standard and Adobe’s Digital Edition and Adobe Content Server 4 (ACS4) digital rights management (DRM) system.

In the US market, Sony’s new library service called Library Finder allows visitors to its ebook site to check whether an ebook is available at their local library. If it is, they’ll be able to borrow it for 21 days to read on their Sony Reader. The service appears to piggy-back on one provided by Overdrive which has a catalogue of about 40,000 commercial ebooks available through the programme.

In the library application, it ensures the ebook can only be read on the borrower’s device and it expires after the 21-day loan period. Unlike the Kindle, however, if a user makes electronic notes on their borrowed ebook, they won’t disappear when the ebook expires but can be uploaded to the user’s desktop along with a snapshot of the book’s text the note relates to.

And on the subject of interesting hardware, here’s a link to Nokia’s entry into the burgeoning netbook market, the Nokia Booklet 3G, showing more boundaries blurring as the computing world and the web go mobile.

And more speculation that Apple, with CEO Steve Jobs now back after an illness, is about to trump the ebook reader market with the much-rumoured Apple tablet.

The trouble started when Amazon withdrew an ebook version of Orwell’s novel after it found the edition infringed copyright. But its hamfisted method of doing this — dipping into its customers’ Kindles without them knowing and removing the offending work — has unnerved a lot of people. It also prompted an embarrassed, almost grovelling, apology from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

But as this New York Times story shows, critics are quick to use the issue as an attack on Digital Rights Management (DRM) as well as civil liberties.

The civil liberties issue is clear enough: If Amazon can withdraw a purchased ebook without consent from its owners’ Kindles, what could a ruthless government or censor do to remove material causing offence for other reasons? In this respect, it’s hard to miss the irony that it was an edition of Orwell’s 1984 that has prompted this fear.

The connection to DRM, widely hated and seen many many as infringing consumer rights, is an interesting turn in this argument. It looks like it was Amazon’s DRM system that was used to remove access to the offending file. Campaigners are now using this incident to attack Amazon’s overall use of DRM.

The legal problem comes from a related issue. An awkward aspect of US copyright law called the First Sale Doctrine could well create problems for Amazon and its publishers. The First Sale Doctrine is a US legal statute that essentially states that once a person buys a copyrighted item, the copyright owner’s control over how the new owner uses and transfers that item largely ends. So for instance the legitimate purchaser retains their right to resell, lend, rent or give the item away. Other jurisdictions may have a similar principle to contend with so the issue is by no means confined to the US or to works sold into the US.

In a possible attempt to circumvent this legal principle, Amazon’s terms of sale state that the ebook is licensed rather than sold outright. This is probably news to a lot of Kindle owners who feel like they’ve bought ownership of their ebook with the same rights as a p-book.

Personally, I think Amazon and publishers should be able to limit transfer of ebooks. But Amazon’s problem here — legal as well as public relations — is that it’s creating the appearance that its ebooks are sold outright rather than on some sort of royalty-free license-to-use basis.  This point — that if it looks like a sale, it probably is a sale in spite of what your terms of sale say — caught out software maker Autodesk a couple of years ago in a case that you could imagine would share a lot of similarities with ebooks if a disgruntled Amazon customer decided to challenge Amazon’s or a publisher’s post-sale behaviour. In the Autodesk case, an eBay trader was selling used copies of its software which it argued were only sold in the first instance on a license-to-use basis. The judge didn’t buy this argument, in spite of Autodesk’s explicit terms of sale, because it gave the appearance of being an outright sale.

The industry, and Amazon, needs to start an education process to make this issue much clearer. And they really need to do some soul searching about whether they can, in fact, have a bob each way on this issue. It’s understandable why Amazon, and no doubt many of its publishers, are being a bit ambiguous on this point. Who, after all, will want to pay close to the full price of a p-book for something that is essentially a long term rental?

But if they don’t come clean, there might be some unpleasant and unexpected consequences. If First Sale rights, or a similar legal doctrine, is recognised in case law or statute as covering ebook sales, there could be interesting consequences, particularly if DRM is also challenged on similar grounds. For instance, a second hand copy of a paper book is generally much cheaper than a new one, doesn’t travel widely, and gets less valuable as its wears out. But what value will a “second hand” ebook file have? If it doesn’t wear out and it travels well, a library or rental store can lend it continually for years with no discernible lessening of quality and no further payment to the author or publisher. And hey, let’s not forget how sociable the web is these days. It’s easy to imagine your favourite internet book club becoming a vast channel to free loans from your large network of online “friends”. Sound familar?

But unlike Stanza, for instance, it doesn’t support open standards such as ePub. What it does is open up the large Kindle ebook catalogue to iPhone/iPod Touch users. And, just as a deluge of smartphones from other manufacturers is about to head our way, Amazon is also expected to make its Kindle reader apps available on other platforms – Kindle ebooks everywhere.

For those who think Amazon is crazy and will end up cannibalising sales of its own Kindle ebook Reader, Amazon has an answer. It will actually increase sales of the reader and Amazon thinks many customers will want both their smartphone and their Kindle to read books on. They see the smartphone as good for short reading and the Kindle for longer sessions, especially with its superior battery life. Reinforcing this will be a feature that will synchronise your reading so both your iPhone and Kindle will open the book you’re reading to the same page. On the point that it will actually increase Kindle sales, I wholeheartedly agree. Once again, Amazon is showing a lot of undertstanding of the digital domain.

One reason is that it also helps address a big objection that’s been levelled against Amazon’s Kindle, namely that its proprietary format and limited support for any other content formats locks you into using a Kindle once you’ve bought your books. Well, no more. It certainly locks you into using the Kindle-formatted books on Amazon-developed  technology, and it gives Amazon a lot of control over its technology development, likely to be a critcal competitive advantage. But consumers will shortly have plenty of choice over which gadgets they buy to read their Kindle ebooks on.

At this stage, you can’t buy Kindle ebooks from within its iPhone app. You need to go to the Amazon website to make your purchases. This will no doubt be addressed at some stage as, presumably, will be the continuing restriction on sales to readers located outside the US.

More coverage from Teleread, ReadWriteWeb and the Wall Street Journal.

What makes Smashwords especially interesting now is that it’s about to extend this service to indie publishers. The publisher service will allow publishers to upload multiple books from multiple authors and have them cross-linked to the publisher’s page and managed together from a single publisher’s account. It’s potentially a simple and effective way for small publishers to get started, helped by its flexible terms of service which are non-exclusive and allow an author or publisher to sell their books elsewhere, electronically or in print, and to terminate at any time.

As well as giving some background to Smashwords and what it does, the interview offers some insights into issues such as pricing and some of the promotional techniques that are working for authors and publishers.

Read the full Smashwords interview from Teleread.

Among the early licensees are Lexcycle, the developer of iPhone ebook reader Stanza, and iRex who put out the iLiad ebook reader.

Importantly, this mobile PDF format supports reflowable text, a feature introduced in Adobe Digital Editions for the PC. This is a key feature that’s been needed if mobile devices are going to use PDF effectively. It will mean that users can read the same document on mobile devices or PCs. And, of course, it plays to Adobe’s strength as the main provider of content design and production tools.

The SDK also includes support for Adobe’s Content Server, the hosted platform which allows Digital Rights Management (DRM) encryption for PDF content.

One benefit of PDF is that it is a better system for controlling how content is displayed on different devices than formats based on HTML/XML standards such as ePub. The latter have to deal with the issue that the same document will look different on different readers’ screens because of how their devices are configured.

Read the full announcement from Adobe of the SDK for putting PDF on mobile devices.