I’ve made a rule for myself to ignore an unfamiliar phrase the first couple of times I hear it, but if I hear it a third time I pay attention. If you haven’t heard the term “ePub” up to now, you’re going to do so with increasing frequency. So maybe you’d better listen up.

If you understand nothing else about e-book readers, at least understand this: they operate either on a closed standard or an open one. If closed, you can read an e-book only on that device. If open, you can read it interchangeably on many devices. Ideally, you should be able to read it on any device.

Music lovers know all about closed systems from Apple’s iTunes store, created a few years ago. You could not transfer music from your iPod to non-Apple players.

The most prominent example of an e-reader with a closed standard is Amazon’s Kindle. You simply can’t download a Kindle title into your cellphone or PDA. Amazon designed its product to keep retail e-book sales inside the Amazon family, and so far the strategy has been a big success. Arguably, however, the success can be attributed to Kindle being the first big commercial e-book reader, and by far the most actively promoted and publicized. Many Kindle owners swear by the device, but with competition mounting from a number of manufacturers and retailers, the next generation of consumers will have more choices. Some of the e-book readers will have a more open format.

Another example of a closed, or proprietary, device is the Sony e-Reader. However, an announcement by Sony of its intention to switch to an open standard will add momentum to the forces arrayed against Kindle. The name of that open standard is ePub. “By the end of the year,” writes Brad Stone of the New York Times, Sony “will sell digital books only in the ePub format, an open standard created by a group including publishers like Random House and HarperCollins.”

The ePub (short for “electronic publication”) standard was developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum. IDPF is a trade organization of e-book manufacturers, retailers, software developers and publishers that from the dawn of the industry – 1998 – has been working to create an open, one-size-fits-all format. Think of it as the e-book equivalent of the standard 33 1/3 rpm established for long-playing phonograph records and 45 rpm for singles. “Sony will also scrap its proprietary anticopying software in favor of technology from the software maker Adobe that restricts how often e-books can be shared or copied,” writes Stone.

Once Sony switches over to ePub, you’ll be able to read an e-book on any reading device that supports the ePub standard. As Stone points out, the battle that will take place around the ePub flag will involve a host of giants, not the least of which is Apple. So, as you shop for your next (or first) e-book reader it is definitely in your best interests to remember the word “ePub”.

Read Brad Stone’s Sony Plans to Adopt Common Format for E-Books.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.