Microsoft's ebook plans trashed by Mobipocket

LIKE THAT KID by the leaky dyke who's fast running out of fingers, Microsoft's ebook plans may soon be drowned in an Anglo-Dutch flood. One of the largest publishing concerns in the world, a firm so ancient they've got a background in alchemy, is rumored to be converting all their scientific journals into the "read anywhere" Mobipocket .prc format, years after turning down a proposal from the Beast that they migrate everything to MS's .lit.

This whisper, if true, is probably generating hysterical laughter in the boardroom of Franklin Electronic Publishers, as that company, which just increased its stake in Mobipocket, once dropped a lot of cash on something called the Ebookman, a Palm-like handheld that was originally supposed to include support for MS-Reader.

Nobody's saying what really happened, but between that June 2000 announcement, the Frankfurt Fair, where Ebookman won a special publishing technology award, the wildly successful introduction of the iPaq, and the (delayed) launch of Ebookman in early 2001, support for Microsoft Reader was dropped. At first, the only way to create content for Ebookman was through the unique markup language FGML, but when would-be providers indicated to management that the "F" in the title must stand for something different, Franklin got together with Mobi, as that company's software was already working on EBMs in addition to Palm, PocketPC, Linux, etc.

Sometime in '02, Franklin announced they'd discontinued the Ebookman line, as the initial devices suffered from numerous issues, not least packaging which still said "Microsoft Reader." However the items are still being manufactured in the Philippines and are available for sale all over, at prices as low as $30 if you're lucky enough to live near a Fry's or an Officemax.

Platform support gives a clear edge to Mobipocket (.lit won't run on Palm), but the whacked part was the Vole's MO. Instead of the gentle, monopolistic giant who, like Elmyra Fudd just wanted to embrace and extend us all to bits, the ebook community got a supposedly Open Ebook Forum, with a Redmond whois, that offers absurd rates on sponsorship, a lousy Alexa ranking, and unbelievably haughty responses to anyone small who might consider advertising there (though why you'd bother...)

Mr. Softie spent all its .lit time dealing with the big names in books. Never been any grassroots support from the company that beat OS/2 by posting on message boards. In fact a Redmond directory, Mslit.com, was launched, its designed to guide readers along the web (primarily to commercial ebook sites), but the new portal ain't making John Marc Ockerbloom of the Online Books Page or David Carter of the Internet Public Library lose any sleep.

They say ebooks are a solution in search of a problem. Not quite true: medical professionals require scientific journals to be up-to-date, and are the only people really buying Tablet PCs currently. Then there's the problem of one textbook government, where you need to have sagas on hand for when the teachers go on about Vikings being nice people. Or, that silly issue about two-thirds of public school libraries not having a single title in stock that a boy would be interested in reading. When that pops up, yeah, it's nice to have some Tarzan around, or Quartermain, or even something by that Jeckyll & Hyde guy, on the off chance a kid gets lost and comes in. Little niches like that...

There was never any point in devoting all of a division's resources to guaranteeing that the contents of every grocery store's paperback rack were available in non-transferable DRM-5 format. Especially not when more than 1/3rd of the trade book business is controlled by hundreds of independents, most of whom face distribution as their biggest challenge.

Sure, some of these smaller companies wouldn't have been perfect candidates for .lit (religious publishers are a tough market for anything to do with Passport activation, it's that whole Revelations 13:16 thing), and some of them couldn't afford the extensive digital rights features no customer wants anyway, but since even the well-known independent McSweeney's is using a Yahoo store for e-commerce, had MS offered something easy to config, with built-in support for instant Paypal and other poor man's digital cash solutions, they'd own the ebook market now, and probably would have licensed a few webservers in the process.

Instead, the world gets to watch large contracts go elsewhere, some of us experiencing the same glee Franklin might be feeling. µ

David Moynihan is webmaster at Blackmask Online and author of the novel Graal, a desperate attempt to cash in on marketing data revealing that what people really want in an ebook is King Arthur combined with Cyberpunk and the terse stylings of hero pulps.