eBook format wars
A timely post from Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords. Mark broke down a 100,000-strong sample of January’s eBook downloads from Smashwords by popularity. The results showed PDF to be the most popular format at 35%.
Quite aside from the fact that I’ve been questioning the wisdom of offering my short stories exclusively in the format, what’s interesting here is that a sample of half that size around twelve months earlier had PDF at number two with just 19%.
The format that PDF is playing toe to toe with is EPUB, an open format specifically created for eBook readers and the official standard of the International Digital Publishing Forum. As such most eBook readers (including the iPad) will accept the format with the Kindle as a notable holdout.
The Kindle prefers the Mobipocket format, probably not a problem in itself except maybe for the punitive DRM lathered over purchased files.
Despite the impressive sample sizes, I’m not convinced at how representative the statistics are. When I see counter-intuitive numbers, I wonder about what kind of sample has been taken. Are the randomly selected eBooks of similar length and content? A loading up of shorter works or non-fiction works (think how-to titles) might well be more popular in PDF as they are quickly scanned or read on a standard computer and forgotten about. Depending how many such titles make it into your sample will depend how much skew they apply to the stats, one way or another. It’s possible the vacillating stats are an artefact of the Wild West of digital publishing—the audience is changing rapidly as is their preferred format for reading—but I doubt it.
What I’d like to see is far more targeted numbers, broken down by the length of the work or its content or whether it is being offered by a publisher or directly by the author. As interesting as Mark’s breakdown is, I suspect there’s little of use we can take away from what we have so far.
There’s a great comparison of all the eBook formats over at Wikipedia.
Smashwords: The Most Popular Ebook Formats Revealed.
Smashwords: Why Multi-Format Ebooks Matter.
Read MoreHollow Edge Published
A new story, Hollow Edge, is now published and online at Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k). The story is a nice companion to some of my more recently written and published short stories, especially White. But, unlike those stories, Hollow Edge has a long and troubled past.
Hollow Edge began life as a very different story around 1999 or maybe 2000 and was titled Heuristic. I was really into one-word titles back then. At the time, I was working on a short story collection that, although meticulously planned, never quite eventuated into print. Looking back at that collection, Heuristic was more than a little out of place.
The story was inspired by the drive between Brisbane and Bundaberg where I worked for a time back in 1997. Somewhere on the highway, in one of the blip towns, was a small housing estate. Evidently a parcel of farm land had been developed into an estate, flanked with billboards, draped with bunting, and offered to the public at bargain prices. One house had been built there. Construction had started on another. By the time I had finished my Bundaberg tenure, the second house had been completed, though a third had stalled partially completed. The billboard images had faded and the edges were peeling. The bunting hung from the street lamps, limp and sad. A failed estate is truly a sad place to see, even from the window of a speeding car.
From there, Hollow Edge took shape as the failed estate to end all failed estates.
I tried a few times to interest various magazines and journals in Heuristic, but, despite a few enthusiastic responses, no one took it on. I tried a tighter redraft about five years ago. Still, little response. So the story languished.
I picked it up again at the end of last year and immediately identified what had been going wrong with the story: superfluous crap. You know when they make three-hour movies with some kind of present-day top and tail scenes (think Titanic or The Green Mile)? Superfluous crap (although The Green Mile was otherwise a great film). So it was with Hollow Edge. Half the word count concerned itself with a rambling account of how the narrator got himself in the middle of nowhere. It didn’t pass the so what test, so it was excised along with a great number of awkward words and phrases, the kind of howlers that make me embarrassed I ever offer the story up to an editor.
The resulting story was clipped and tight. Lovely. Off to Poor Mojo with you.
So, if you want to read it, here it is, in glorious black and white. Hope you like it.
This link takes to the story’s perpetual link. Enjoy.
Read MoreThe Books
