When ebooks hit the scene, I entertained visions of these publishing gents gathering at the club and, cheeks rosy with fine wine, jovially clinking their glasses and agreeing to an open standard for the new medium. No need to duke it out in an unseemly fashion in the marketplace. "Leave the nuts and bolts to the boys down in the technical department," I hear them say, freeing them to spend their time rooting out and nurturing new talent, bolstering the midlist, commissioning new art for the covers of their classic works and trying to figure some way to increase author royalties.
Yes, I live in a fantasy world, but this scenario is not quite as far fetched as it seems.
Recently a new medium was introduced with just this kind of civility, that is, if you ignore the yelling and screaming and, it's rumored, hair-pulling that went on behind the scenes. I'm speaking of the Digital Video (or Versatile) Disc.
Back in '94, two camps warred to set the standard for issuing movies on a CD-sized disc. One came from a contingent headed by Toshiba and Time Warner, the other from a competing group spearheaded by Philips and Sony.
You may remember the Sony company from the Beta/VHS war of the late 1970s to early 1980s. The war was a disaster for the new medium of home videotape.
After a bunch of home video formats came and went making barely a dent in the public consciousness, two competitors were left standing: Sony's Beta and JVC's VHS.
Beta had the better picture and sound, but Sony kept it to themselves. If one wanted a Beta-format video recorder, one had to buy it from Sony. They refused to license its patents to others. In grade school they would receive the notation on their report card, "Does not play well with others."
VHS wasn't as good but it was good enough and JVC licensed the patents to everyone with a credit card and a factory in China.
The result: VHS machines appeared in every store that carried such things, competition drove down the price, and people bought them by the thousands (and eventually, by the millions and tens of millions). Sony Betamaxes appeared only at Sony dealers, cost more, and people bought them now and again.
Movie studios began issuing prerecorded tapes first and, later, exclusively in the VHS format. Beta died, much to the enrichment of yard sales and thrift stores all over America.
The Beta/VHS war demonstrated clearly the limitations of setting standards by battling it out in the marketplace. The system works, eventually, but it costs a lot of money, causes tremendous confusion among consumers and leaves a charnel house of corpses in its wake in the form of outmoded media and machines.
Another war was raging about this same time, this one in the computer world where Apple's outstanding Macintosh operating system was dancing like a butterfly around a clumsy opponent known as Windows.
Again, Apple insisted that anyone wanting their operating system had to buy their computer. The hubris at the time was that the Macintosh would be "the Mercedes of computers," blithely ignoring the fact that it was a Mercedes that needed its own fuel and own roads that no other car could use.
Meanwhile Microsoft was licensing the dull-witted Windows to everybody with a credit card and a factory in China. (Wait, have I heard that phrase somewhere before?)
In the ensuing years Apple invested hundreds of millions of dollars in promoting the Macintosh and managed to shrink its market share from forty percent down to two, thereby earning Apple's various CEOs multi-million dollar salaries and golden parachutes. Hey, no one ever said life was fair.
Somewhere in this article I began to talk about DVDs and now here we are again, like a hiker lost in the woods who finds himself at the same fallen log he'd passed six hours ago.
In 1994, instead of battling in the marketplace, the two sides in the dispute over a standard DVD format sat down at the negotiating table and hammered out an agreement. No Beta/VHS war for the modern businessman! While the discussion was heated, it was more like a tag team wrestling match than all-out war.
In one corner was the Toshiba/Time Warner alliance with a double-sided disc. In the other corner, Philips and Sony with a double-layered disc. There were other differences in the formats but only engineers understand or care about what they were, and I'm no engineer.
Anyway, as a result a single standard emerged and the DVD player enjoyed the most successful launch of any home electronics product ever. Fancy that.
But this is a new millennium and now ebooks are on the table and mankind has apparently devolved to a more primitive state. Formats abound (proprietary, of course, and incompatible with one another) as everyone tries to force their own standard on the rest of the world.
Why this backward slide into primitivism on the part of the blossoming ebook industry when it's obvious that a little bit of cooperation would get ebooks rolling a lot faster, cheaper and more effectively?
Well, I blame our sports-obsessed, winner-take-all culture, blinding corporate greed and hormones in the beef, but that could just be me.
J. Knight is the author of the ebook "Risen" published by Time Warner's iPublish division. He maintains a web presence at: http://www.atombrain.com