Is Apple really sabotaging an open standard?
23/01/2012 12:00 PM
I read the recent ZDNet article How Apple is sabotaging an open standard for digital books with some interest. Can a company actually sabotage an open standard?
Apple have developed a digital book that is far richer and interactive than previous digital books. Apparently Apple have extended the EPUB format and therefore broken it. So they have taken the open standard and presumably adopted the same principles and underlying technologies in the existing standard to support their new digital books. That doesn’t seem so bad. They could have invented something completely new. The reality is that most changes to a published standard are likely to create problems of backward compatibility.
I cannot think of any company, wishing to capitalise on its own intellectual property, that would want to signal those intentions by requesting a change to an existing open standard before product release and the logical conclusion of the ZDNet article is that all digital book readers should only support the official EPUB standard. That would mean no progress in this area.
The question is whether Apple will contribute their extensions to the community and make them ‘open’ in a new version of the EPUB standard. The custodians of the EPUB standard, the International Digital Publishing Forum, already recognises that the standard needs further development. So maybe this will happen. Let’s see before jumping to any conclusions.
This article was originally published in Kevin Smith’s blog, “The Cloud Data Technologist” in January 2012.
I cannot think of any company, wishing to capitalise on its own intellectual property, that would want to signal those intentions by requesting a change to an existing open standard before product release and the logical conclusion of the ZDNet article is that all digital book readers should only support the official EPUB standard. That would mean no progress in this area.
The question is whether Apple will contribute their extensions to the community and make them ‘open’ in a new version of the EPUB standard. The custodians of the EPUB standard, the International Digital Publishing Forum, already recognises that the standard needs further development. So maybe this will happen. Let’s see before jumping to any conclusions.
This article was originally published in Kevin Smith’s blog, “The Cloud Data Technologist” in January 2012.