Open eBook

~ the obit ~

Nobody chooses a file format. You choose a device or an application and the format arrives underneath it, unnamed, and you never think about it again unless it breaks. That is the reason this grave has no personal anchor worth claiming. In 1999 I was on dial-up in Turkey reading things on paper, and the first time an electronic book was a real object in my life was a decade later, by which point the format underneath had already been dead for years and I would not have noticed either way.

Open eBook, properly the Open eBook Publication Structure, came out of an industry group that assembled in the late nineties around a problem nobody else was going to solve. Several companies were building reading devices at once and each one had its own file layout. Without a common target there was no publisher incentive to produce anything, and without titles there was no reason to buy a device. The Open eBook Forum published version 1.0 in september 1999, drawing mostly on technology developed by SoftBook Press.

What it specified is almost funny in its modesty. A zip archive containing a manifest file next to a defined subset of XHTML for the text itself. Styling came from CSS and the metadata came from Dublin Core, both borrowed rather than invented. Version 1.0.1 replaced it in june 2001 and version 1.2 became the recommended specification in august 2002. Then it stopped moving.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

The reason the specification looks so plain is that it was correct. Books are structured text with some styling, and the web had already solved structured text with some styling. Open eBook's real contribution was refusing to invent anything: it took XHTML and CSS and drew a line around the parts a small device could be expected to render.

The devices that shipped against it were the first generation of dedicated readers, the SoftBook and the Rocket eBook among them, joined later by desktop software including Microsoft Reader. None of these sold in numbers that mattered. The format was ready roughly eight years before the hardware and the bookstore that would have made it useful, and a standard waiting that long usually gets replaced by something written by whoever shows up when the market finally arrives.

~ the inheritance ~

Open eBook is one of the rare cases where that did not happen. In september 2007 the Open eBook Forum, by then renamed the International Digital Publishing Forum, published Open Publication Structure 2.0 and packaged it under the name EPUB. It was not a rewrite. It was the same architecture with the loose parts tightened, and every EPUB file in the world is still a zip archive holding a manifest next to a subset of XHTML.

So this is a grave for the name and not for the idea. The specification that died in 2007 is running on almost every reading device sold since, under other branding, having outlived the companies that wrote it. That is a better outcome than most formats get, and it is invisible, which is exactly what a format is supposed to be.

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