In nature big fish eat little fish, but in business the opposite is often true: the small destroy the large.  Small, nimble, clever, aggressive startups with nothing to lose are able to undermine staid, clumsy behemoths burdened by overhead, bureaucracy and legacies.

Hmm. Are we thinking of any small, nimble industry in particular? Of any staid, clumsy behemoth industry in particular?

Clayton Christensen is a student of the rise and fall of big companies, and he’s coined a wonderful phrase to describe the cycle: Disruptive Innovation. He describes it as “a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves ‘up market’, eventually displacing established competitors.”

In the space of a decade we have seen the digital book industry (that is the small industry you were thinking of, isn’t it?) soar from novelty to dominance, absorbing in the process a far larger publishing business like a snake unhinging its jaw to consume a sheep.

But there’s a corollary to the rule of disruptive innovation, for, after battening on its huge prey, the smaller company itself becomes fat and soft and susceptible to the predations of the next generation of hungry young businesses.

A recent New York Times editorial, Remember Microsoft?, exemplifies the concept. “Technology upends companies in different ways,” itl stated. “It allows new firms to deliver better products and services in a more efficient way; it also creates new goods and services for consumers to want. Eastman Kodak, the fifth-biggest company in the S.& P. 500 in 1975, was almost destroyed by digital cameras and is no longer in the index. General Motors, fifth biggest in 1985, was hobbled by rivals that could make more fuel efficient cars. Microsoft still rules the PC desktop. But that will matter less and less as users migrate to tablets and more computing takes place in ‘the cloud.’”

Which brings us back to e-books. It’s hard to imagine that they may simply be a bridge to a far larger media world, but if Christensen’s theory holds up, a day may come when the hegemony of giants like Google, Amazon and Apple becomes vulnerable to a fast-moving aggressor, and the cycle begins all over again. Don’t believe it? Just yesterday we wrote about powerful new programs like ePub3 and HTML5 that will make e-books look positively Gutenbergian.  Let’s hope we’re all around to see the day.  Or maybe some of us would rather not.

Read Disruptive Innovation and watch the video.

Richard Curtis

If you’re not sure what ePub is, don’t worry. It will soon be history.

This digital format, which has done as much in its own way as the Kindle to hyperdrive the e-book business, has been the industry’s workhorse ever since ePub 2.0 was officially adopted in 2007 as the standard for production of reflowable digital books. It is the building block for Sony, Apple, Google and other e-book formats.  Even Amazon, which has its own proprietary format, accepts submission of ePub files, which can then be converted to Kindle’s unique language. (See What is ePub and Why Is It Important to You?)

EPub is still a superb tool if all you want to do is read – or publish -  an e-book in English or another western tongue. But what if your native language is Chinese or Japanese or Arabic or Hebrew?  EPub is not up to the task of handling symbols and pictograms or languages written up and down or right to left.

Or what if you want to “read” a vook or an app replete with videos, music and other enhancements? The ePub format is simply inadequate to the challenge of creating these complex multimedia works.

Enter ePub3, a more global, complex, interactive, media-rich format perfectly suited for the demands of the next generation of book (if after it is completely enhanced it will be recognizable as a book). EPub3 is currently being reviewed and tested by publishers, developers and other interested parties with an eye to rollout in 2012.

In an interview in O’Reilly Radar, Book Master executive Bob Kasher highlights three significant features of the new format: language support, greater accessibility, and increased multimedia functionality.

1) Language Support. “Language support, Kasher explains, “will allow ePub3 to save and search non-Roman scripts — such as Japanese, Chinese and Arabic — as font characters rather than jpegs… It will truly internationalize ePub.”

2. Greater Accessibility. By “greater accessibility” Kasher means that the new format will be far friendlier to the visually impaired, employing so-called “DAISY” (Digital Accessible Information System) standards for digital talking books, according to the DAISY Consortium, the official international organization.

3. Support for Multimedia Applications. Finally, and foremost, “ePub3 will be much more adept at supporting multimedia capabilities for both HTML5-based devices and the coming generation of tablets supporting both Flash and HTML5. It is hoped that in doing so, ePub3 will help develop an enhanced ebook standard that can be used across a variety of media and content.”

HTML by the way is the language that governs most Internet websites, and HTML5 is being designed to accommodate the same demands of multimedia and interactivity for the Internet that ePub3 is designed for text. (See What is HTML5, and Why Should You Care?)

For those of us who are perfectly happy settling down with a plain old conventional bells-less and whistles-less e-book, don’t worry: ePub version 3.0 will be “backward compatible” with 2.0, the current standard, even though it will one day be looked at by our grandchildren as primitive and one-dimensional – just like us.

Read What to expect in EPUB3

Richard Curtis