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The long-trumpeted eBook has delivered little, but a new chapter is unfolding as heavyweight tech companies start to smell a profit. The big question for consumers is whether this seminal period will have a happy ending.

After years of inertia, there's been a flurry of activity in the eBook industry: software developer Adobe has thrown its weight behind a new format, Amazon plans to unveil the Kindle eBook reader, while Google aims to give surfers access to books it's archived - at a price.

The problem is the systems are unlikely to be compatible. In this nascent market, consumers are confronted by conflicting formats and a DRM-riddled land grab from publishing and technology companies.

"Compatibility is definitely a concern for the commercial eBook world and has hindered adoption," says Dr Greg Newby, CEO of Project Gutenberg, a huge copyright-free eBook library. "Fundamentally, eBooks are files, and having the file locked to a particular device or software that only runs on a particular device, or some other sort of protection or encoding, is unfriendly to readers."

The problem is exemplified by Sony's Reader (only available in the UK as an import). The tablet will display books bought and downloaded in BBeB format from Sony's Connect site - and PDF, text or RTF files - but it won't show books that consumers have bought from companies such as Palm or Mobipocket. "It's no surprise that Sony is keeping a hardware link, any more than it's surprising that Amazon will use Mobipocket," claims a digital specialist at a major London publisher. "It's protection and expansion of profit."

Open or closed?

With so many competing formats, the book world might have welcomed the new "open" EPUB format proposed by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), but no sooner was the standard launched than it received criticism as a sell-out. EPUB - heavily funded by Adobe - is essentially an XHTML reader for eBooks, but among its first incarnations was Adobe's Digital Editions, a reader built specifically with the commercial market in mind, and all the DRM that goes with it.

The eBook community fears the benefits are all for publishers, not for readers, and even Adobe admits that Digital Editions has less functionality than Acrobat. Adobe chose not to respond

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to criticisms that it was too powerful a member of the standards body that came up with EPUB. It hasn'' gone unnoticed, however, that within weeks of EPUB being released the IDPF executive director, Nick Bogaty, accepted a post with Adobe.

The big mystery is why the industry felt it needed another format when there are already so many open standards. "I think we have enough formats already," says Newby. "XML and similar formats [such as HTML], Plucker, PDF and others do just fine on eBook readers, and they don't restrict what readers can do."

eBook evangelists are angered that commercial readers, whether based on EPUB or other commercial formats, reduce options and devalue the technology. "They're putting in restrictions mostly for control purposes, not accessibility," says Newby. "Many open formats, such as Plucker, can work on eBook devices but don't block the things that readers want to do. The main inspiration for most dedicated eBook formats is to take away functionality, not to add it. They remove the ability to cut and paste or print."

Sky-high prices

It's no wonder the book trade wants to keep its wares locked down - the mark-up is enormous. Go to Amazon in the US and Patricia Cornwell's latest tome At Risk can be snapped up for $8, but over at Mobipocket - a French subsidiary of the online retailer - the same eBook costs $22.

If these were audio books, with the associated cost of hiring a narrator, studio and producer then the difference could possibly be justified, but these are bog-standard text files without printing or distribution costs. "The cost is fairly arbitrary," says Clare Christian, MD and publishing director of The Friday Project, a London publisher. "As an industry, we're still finding our feet. They could be clawing back some of the R&D, but it's still too expensive."

Charles Wright, an eBook convert, is typical when he says, "I've never paid for an eBook; there's plenty of free stuff out there, either from libraries or illegal downloads."

There are obvious parallels to be drawn with the ham-fisted way the music industry has tackled the problem of copy protection in recent times, and it seems book publishers haven't learned from this as they make the same mistakes. "They're trying to learn from the history of music - they know there's a threat but they don't know what to do about it," says Christian. "It's an archaic industry, they're dinosaurs really, terrified of anything that threatens their market - they don't want to give anything away."

Given the right tools, such as the locked-down software from Adobe and Amazon, they won't have to, but it won't stop consumers voting with their feet.