Caveat Lector

Let’s see how much more trouble I can get myself into, hm? From Doc Weinberger’s weblog:

So, here’s my plea to Bill Gates: Be the white knight. Swing your mighty sword in favor of building the most vibrant marketplace for ideas and creativity the earth has ever seen. Storm the halls of Congress. Make it your personal compaign, Bill.

Sorry, Doc W, but my experience with one Microsoft ebookist suggests that you’ve got a lost cause on your hands there.

Disclaimers: The occasion I am about to recount occurred well over a year ago, and at least one ebook-team reorg has happened at Microsoft since then. Things may well have changed. I CATEGORICALLY REFUSE to disclose the identity of the Microsoft employee central to my tale. I won’t even disclose hir gender (and the ebook team I knew at the time was split pretty evenly between men and women), so you’ll have to cope with weird pronouns when I refer to er.

The only NDA I think I may have signed with Microsoft (and I may not have signed any; I honestly can’t remember) would have been signed well after this occasion, so I’m not exposing myself to legal ugliness as far as I can tell. Moreover, my conclusion could be suspected by any half-aware person; all I am really doing is offering anecdotal evidence in support of it.

And a prefatory note: Microsoft has been the single strongest supporter of the Open eBook Forum, committing considerable sums of money and considerable time from several brilliant techies. I frankly doubt the OEBF would have survived without Microsoft. I can also say honestly that I have never, not once, seen even the subtlest attempt by Microsoft to strongarm any OEBF action into something that would benefit Microsoft specifically, or cause specific harm to any of Microsoft’s ebookspace competitors. Whatever their private plans, they’ve played fair so far in ebookspace.

Enough disclaimer. Enough preface. On to our story.

But first… a bit of technical background. (I’ll try to make it painless.) “OEB” is often spoken of as an “ebook format.” This usage is somewhat dubious, because the OEBPS Publication is often (almost always, in fact) not the final digital form the ebook’s content takes. (When you consider that there’s no especially good way to add encryption to a miscellaneous collection of files, this will perhaps seem less surprising.)

The OEBPS says that a “reading system” is a black box that takes in the collection of files (text, images, etc.) that constitutes an OEBPS Publication and spits out a reading experience. How the reading system does this—the details of the black box, or even whether it’s one black box or several—is entirely up to the reading system designers.

Several reading systems, including Microsoft’s, have split the task into two tasks accomplished wholly separately: boiling down the OEBPS Publication to a single binary file, and presenting that binary file to the person reading. (In Microsoft’s case, the former task is accomplished by a software library called litgen.dll, slick GUI wrappers for which are made by my ex-employer. The latter task is what Microsoft Reader accomplishes.)

This is a perfectly acceptable solution vis-a-vis the OEBPS; it’s not the only acceptable solution, but it’s fine. Moreover, the OEBPS says nothing about what these intermediate binary files look like, act like—or how they compete in the marketplace. (How could it? The OEBPS doesn’t say these binary files have to exist!)

Unfortunately, these binary files (some call them “delivery formats,” a usage I can live with) have gained the status of “format” in a lot of people’s minds. Since people (especially journalists, in my experience) like a good fight, these delivery formats are perceived as competing, even though they can be generated from the same OEBPS Publication and are better thought of as implementation details of the reading systems, irrelevant in and of themselves to reading-system competition in the marketplace.

(I exaggerate the interoperability of OEBPS Publications slightly. Reading system quirks mean that an OEBPS Publication tailored for one reading system won’t look ideal on another. The differences are far less pervasive and difficult to work around than those in web browsers, however.)

So by its silence on the topic of delivery format, the OEBPS has tried to eliminate ebook-market fragmentation on the basis of initial coding of content (which was the point of the OEBPS in the first place), but has created that same fragmentation on the basis of delivery format!

(This is an enormously difficult problem to solve. I call it insoluble, myself, and think the OEBPS did the right thing by staying away from it. But that’s a topic for another blog.)

So. We now have Microsoft’s delivery format competing with others, just as we did at the NIST eBook 2000 conference in Washington DC…

A month or two before that conference, I had gotten a call out of the blue at work from a Microsoft recruiter. (I know who spurred that call now, but at the time I felt like a cartoon character flattened by a totally unexpected ten-ton anvil.) Shortly before I left for DC, some Microsoft ebookists—ones I didn’t already know from OEBF work—invited me out to dinner on arrival night.

“Self, you’re being sussed out for a job offer,” I told myself. “Be careful. You’d rather slay a fire-breathing dragon than work for the Evil Empire.” (Both my husband and a former co-worker can verify my fascinated horror at the recruitment call and the invitation, in case I am suspected of either sour grapes or undeserved self-praise here. I assure you, I tellin’ it like it wuz.)

I accepted the invitation, but found the first occasion I could at dinner to explain that I had a husband in graduate school and was therefore not mobile. As we parted at the Microsofties’ hotel (I was staying with my in-laws, who live in the DC area), the person who had done most of the talking said that if I were amenable, which e quite understood I was unable to be, e would “hire me on the spot.” I thanked er for hir good opinion of me and left, congratulating myself silently on how gracefully I had managed to extricate myself from the situation (social grace, especially under pressure, is not a hallmark of mine).

E hadn’t given up, though. E took me to the food court at the Reagan Center the next day for coffee (hot chocolate for me) and a talk. The talk was an ersatz job interview; e didn’t try to hide that, or even be subtle about it. E did, though, talk pretty freely about Microsoft’s strategy in the ebook arena.

Y’all won’t be surprised, after all the buildup I’ve done, to find out that that strategy consisted of pushing other reading systems out of the market by aggressive development and promotion of Microsoft’s delivery format. (Secondary strategy, which I got the impression hadn’t been very thoroughly thought out, involved bypassing the OEBPS by creating direct-to-MS-delivery-format filters for Word and Quark, two ubiquitous tools in print publishing.) To give er all due credit, though, e indicated firmly and repeatedly (and, I believe, truthfully) that making MS’s delivery format as rich and powerful as possible was the cornerstone of this strategy. Honey, not vinegar.

But I wouldn’t call on Bill Gates and crew to open up the creation and dissemination of content if I were Doc W. They weren’t thinking in those terms at eBook 2000, and I’d be plentifully surprised if they are now. Control, control, control, with a dash of lack of choice.

Caveat lector! Caveat lector! Caveat lector!