Time for ebooks to turn a new leaf ?
Ebooks have largely failed to exploit the benefits of digital. But that’s all set to change, finds Nicole Kobie
Most novels downloaded via Amazon to a Kindle are no more than digital versions of the same text on paper
Ebooks were the future once: e-readers were Hitchhiker’s Guide-style wizardry holding thousands of books, accessible anywhere. Now paper is making a comeback. Despite smartphones letting us read almost any text, novel or magazine anywhere, ebook sales slid 10% in 2017, according to market research firm NPD Group.
No wonder publishers have resorted to name calling. “The ebook is a stupid product,” Arnaud Nourry, chief executive of Hachette Livre, was reported as saying in a story in The
Guardian. But it wasn’t a childish tantrum: Nourry was criticising how poorly ebooks have been exploited by publishers. “It is exactly the same as print, except it’s electronic. There is no creativity, no enhancement, no real digital experience,” he said.
For the most part, that’s true: ebooks are dumb. Most novels downloaded via Amazon to a Kindle are no more than digital versions of the same text that’s on paper pages. “That precedent was set when the boom first happened,” said Koko Ekong, technical and design manager for ebook production at Penguin Random House UK. Publishers in a rush to get ebooks to market simply released carbon copies of print books. “I think doing that, as well as lowering cost to get market saturation, set a precedent that’s been hard to shake in public perception.”
Ebooks don’t have to be that way – and there’s plenty of creative innovation on show from publishers that take a digital-first approach, such as giving would-be chefs video cooking lessons or translating between languages on the fly. “For ebooks to fully realise their potential, publishers will need to stop approaching it from a print-first workflow and look at it as its own entity, its own beast,” Ekong added.
While such features are only starting to slip into ebooks, even the basic print replicas have their own clever uses of technology thanks to the hardware they’re loaded onto, with innovations such as Amazon’s audiobook syncing-tool Whispersync proving so smooth and simple it’s indistinguishable from magic, as one famous sci-fi author once wrote. Here we uncover the clever tech that makes ebooks smarter than paper and what to expect next in the ebook evolution.
Basic text, big benefits
Paper has benefits. Many people find it easier on the eyes, and books on shelves aren’t locked down with digital rights management (DRM) that prevent you from passing them on to your wife or the charity shop.
But ebooks have a few basic features that can change lives. Aside from the key selling point of carrying a library in a slim, light device, ebook text can be reformatted with different text styles and sizes, a boon to those without perfect vision. Most ebooks are published in the EPUB file format – Amazon rejigs files into its own proprietary version, but it’s how they start life – and the flexibility in that standard means ebooks are “inherently accessible”, said Ekong, thanks to features such as changing text size and contrast, as well as text-to-speech. “That’s one of the strengths of the reflowable version of the EPUB, because the content adapts to whatever container it’s viewed in, you’re not limited to screen size, aspect ratio and things like that,” he explained. “The reader can adjust font sizes.”
That may seem simple, but it’s no easy task and depends on a robust file standard. You can’t reflow text in a PDF, for example, if you’d like a larger font. But the EPUB format – formally known as “electronic publication” files – changed the game.
EPUB files are based on documents created with Extensible Markup Language (XML). Anthony Simnica, digital operations director at Hachette UK, notes that at the start of the digital revolution, publishers created ebooks from Word files or PDFs, unpicking formatting to make them work in EPUB. Using XML from the beginning now means books are perfectly tagged and formatted for print and digital.
The magical thing about this is the narration matches the highlighted word precisely
That’s what allows – and necessitates – features that tell you what percentage of a book is left and how much time it will take the average reader. Page numbers are no longer meaningful. “We have baked into the software locally a kind of baseline of how long it takes to read a certain number of words, and then we’ll adjust those accordingly,” explained Will Chaban, product owner at Rakuten Kobo, an ebook seller and e-reader maker. “We don’t have to dial into a central server to analyse that, so if you’re reading on vacation then you’ll still get a reasonable estimate of how much time is left in your book.” Staying in sync
Ebooks are smarter than merely rejigging fonts or counting words, of course. Most e-readers or e-reading apps will let you look up words in a dictionary or perform basic foreign translations. On Kobo’s system, there are two dozen dictionaries and translations embedded in every e-reader. “The dictionaries we automatically download [to your e-reader] are a subset based on which language you choose up front,” said Chaban. “If I pick English, it’ll automatically download the English dictionary and translations from English to each language we provide. But you can go and pick in the settings multiple dictionaries to download.”
Basic ebook readers have other features we take for granted, notably bookmarking, notes and highlights. That’s done by syncing locations in a book; the Kobo system can mark the beginning and end of each word.
One of the most impressive features is syncing audio versions with ebook text, so far only available via Amazon’s Whispersync. Jeff Bezos’ ecommerce giant bought audiobook company Audible in 2008 for $300 million, and in 2012 introduced Whispersync, which links the two formats. Listen to an audiobook on your walk to the train station and, if you have connectivity, you can pick up right where you left off in the ebook. Or, in “immersive” mode, you can read the text while listening to the audio version at the same time.
The magical thing about this is the narration matches the highlighted word on the page precisely. And that’s a boon for people – especially children – with reading difficulties. It allows them to enjoy books without losing their place on their page. One parent we spoke to – who asked not to be named – said his dyslexic teenage daughter only started reading books again when they discovered Whispersync, as it helps her to read at the same pace as her peers.
Amazon wouldn’t reveal the finer points of how that technology worked, but Kobo did explain why its ebooks don’t yet support such a syncing system – in short, it’s crazy difficult. “Some of it is due to how the books are licensed to us – the provider of the ebook and the provider of the audiobook aren’t necessarily in harmony there,” Chaban explained. While that explains why Amazon bought Audible to make Whispersync work, there’s also the technical challenge. “If the underlying metadata to tell us this word in the book matches with this point in the audio isn’t there, if we don’t have that information, then it’s a challenge to cross-reference both positions accurately.”
Amazon’s other magical ebook feature is a bit more mundane, though equally helpful to readers. X-Ray lets you hold down a word or phrase to find out more about it, pulling in information from Wikipedia or letting authors write their own entries. Like Whispersync, it’s a tool added by Amazon, so only available on Kindle. Authors who publish their own books via Kindle Direct Publishing can enable the feature in their books simply by tapping a button in the publishing platform. The X-Ray system will automatically create X-Ray entries by pulling in information from Wikipedia and from elsewhere in the book, such as when the word being queried is a character, although the author can edit those to avoid spoilers.
That is the advantage of the EPUB format – technically there’s no limit to what you can do
Page-turning features When you’re sitting down to read a fabulous new novel, you don’t necessarily want any on-page distractions – just the text – but there’s more to ebooks than novels, and plenty of non-fiction could benefit from digital content.
Thanks to the EPUB format, there’s not much that a webpage can do that ebooks can’t, in theory at least. Imagine cookbooks with embedded video or children’s picture books with animations to catch the attention of any youngster. Textbooks could come with 3D models, snippets of lectures, or video explainers.
Ekong revealed a few ebooks in the works at Penguin Random House, some that have yet to be published. One cookbook uses embedded fonts, meaning it has the same beautiful design as the paper version, and can reflow ingredient lists to best match the device you’re using. On an ebook, they get a separate page; on a larger tablet, they’re flowed into a neat sidebar, meaning all the information you need to start cooking is on-screen, meaning no flipping is necessary when your hands are mucky in the kitchen.
Children’s books will have subtle animations, helping to boost immersion, said Ekong. A German classic lets you flip between the original text and the translation without leaving the page. A James Joyce edition has line numbering built-in – handy for those studying the text at school who need to reference specific sections.
Some are simple changes; others could revolutionise how we read. “That is the advantage of the EPUB format, technically there’s no limit to what you can do,” said Ekong.
The device you’re using to read matters. If you’re flipping digital pages on an e-ink reader, content-rich features such as video aren’t available. Move the file to an app on a more robust device, such as an Android or Apple tablet, and you’ll see them.
Of course, that’s easier said than done. Because most ebook platforms are locked down, switching isn’t easy. “If you’re firmly entrenched in the Amazon ecosystem, and you upgrade from an older Kindle to a newer one ten years later, as long as you use the same system, no problem,” said Ekong. “The problem is if you’re in the Amazon system and you switch to Apple.” But that’s a market issue, not a technical challenge. Competing with print
While sales figures suggest e-ink readers may be at saturation point, ebooks and print books aren’t necessarily in competition. “We’re competing for people’s time,” said Simnica, and the rivals aren’t always other books but games, streaming video and everything else our smartphones and tablets offer. And that’s why tech that makes reading easier, be it line numbering, text reflowing or the dark magic of Whispersync, is the future of ebooks. “Making reading as convenient as possible is a high priority,” Simnica said.
If such whizzy features appeal, you need not pass over Amazon for Apple. Plenty of such clever coding will work across Amazon’s Fire tablets or even Fire TV. And, because the EPUB standard is open, ebooks are readable on almost every device that can support web technologies such as HTML and CSS. Indeed, support is already built into Microsoft’s Edge Browser, while there are ebook extensions for Chrome.
The capabilities and support for EPUB is set to expand further. The standards body that currently manages the format, the International Digital Publishing Forum, last year merged with WC3, the web standards organisation. “EPUB, or something based on it, will become the de facto document format for the web,” said Ekong.
“This is where a lot of people think this might be going. You can already see it starting to manifest in little ways, such as the Edge browser natively supporting EPUB now.” Sales of ebooks may be sliding, but they could soon take over the web. Take that, print.