Opening an E-Book
By Dale Dougherty
Most discussions about electronic books begin by describing how important it is to have reading matter available while on the toilet. This might just be a guy thing. And then there's the endless argument about whether a person wants to read online. The fact is I do, and you do, and we both do it a lot more today than we did a year ago. Which is to say that e-books will make more and more sense to us, despite a number of plausible objections.
E-books (Wired Style doesn't weigh in on e-books vs. ebooks as it has on email, except to say that "e-" was named 1998 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society) are books that can be viewed and searched on a computer, often using a specialized browser, such as the Microsoft Reader, or even a specialized device, such as NuvoMedia's RocketBook. E-books may be delivered directly to you for use on your computer (or appliance) or you can access the titles on a server. E-books are coming; the only question is in what format.
Candidates for electronic document formats hold positions at different ends of a graphics-text spectrum. At one end are PostScript and Portable Document Format (PDF), both of which describe a page as a set of graphic components. This format achieves a high level of fidelity between a printed page and its electronic equivalent. At the other end are structured markup, such as SGML and XML. This text-oriented format provides for a broad range of uses for an electronic document, such as indexing, but is not always an ideal solution for rendering pages.
The battle between PDF and HTML has already been played out on the Web.
