Bait 'n' Beer

In today's twitterstream I was directed to two articles about standards and the difficulties publishers, device makers and readers are having since there is no agreed-upon standard for formatting and rendering digital content. Both Joshua Gans' post on  "A Tale of Two Industries: Games and Books" at Core Economics (economics.com.au and "Dear Jeff Bezos: What the World Needs is an Open EReader" by John Mediema at TeleRead (www.teleread.org/2010/03/22/dear-jeff-bezos-what-the-world-needs-is-an-open-ereader-by-john-mediema/).

 The punchline of both these pieces is that proprietary formats hinder the reader's experience and the advancement of the digital publishing market for all the reasons that have been hashed about many times over and that don't need to be repeated here. In general, this thesis is correct...standards must prevail...but there are reasons why standards aren't adopted immediately. A little economic history helps put this into perspective.
 
I'm currently reading T.J. Stiles' epic biography of steamship and railroad baron (and creator of the endowment for my alma mater) Cornelius Vanderbilt, called The First Tycoon (Knopf, 2009). It's a terrific read if you're into that sort of thing, describing not only the Commodore's personal and business life but also how he understood and reflected the changing political economy of his time and used his insight and tough-mindedness to exploit (in both the good and bad senses of that word) those changes to amass unsurpassed wealth. Highly recommended reading.
 
As a part of the history of Vanderbilt's railroad conquests, Stiles reveals the following:
"[In] 1860, a total of 30,616 miles of track draped the American landscape; hundreds of companies made up that network, which had as many as seven different gauges (widths between tracks), from 4 feet 8 1/2 inches ...to 6 feet.... This confusion dated back to the origins of the system in the 1830's and '40's...[when] railroad corporations had been created by the merchants of various cities and towns to funnel trade toward themselves. Local communities fiercely resisted integration of the network for fear that business would roll right past them; they wanted breaks between railroads despite the inefficiencies imposed on long distance commerce...By the start of the Civil War...the profusion of incompatible gauges and the fragmentation of companies persisted with consequent costs from "breaking bulk" (loading freight from one car into another) and outbreaks of hostilities between connecting lines."
 
And later:
"...a central feature of railroad economics [was] the difference between traffic from 'competitive points' and purely local traffic where a railway had a monopoly and...could charge higher local rates where it had no competition."

 Sound familiar? If you're Amazon, Apple or one of the other device manufacturers cum content vendors, and if you believe you have staying power, the last thing you want is a standard because you want to control the "local traffic" where you can charge the most.
 
The way the problem got resolved in the case of the railroads was Vanderbilt effectively consolidated the key lines and created an even bigger monopoly out of the many small monopoly lines (crushing more than a few opponents along the way). While there was a time (before Apple's and Google's respective entries onto the e-reading scene) that it looked like Amazon could play the role of Vanderbilt, that seems unlikely now.
 
Notwithstanding that, however, whether or not these three key players pay lip service to the Epub standard (and speaking of standards, can we finally agree upon which, if any letters in Epub to capitalize?) it's in none of the 'big three's' interest to actually standardize until overall digital reading reaches a market share where volume sales can overtake (monopoly) margins to produce the same or greater profitability (or growth in market share of their own businesses) that each can achieve with a proprietary system.
 
We've come a way since the 1870's and technology, the voice of consumers and other factors will eventually drive digital reading to some sort of standard. But if you're holding off purchasing a device until you get total interoperability, you may be riding the wrong railroad for a while yet.