Hear, hear!

Hear, hear!

Originally shared by Rob Donoghue

I saw the google-->epub news on a private feed on my phone, so I quickly shared out of excitement, but now that i have minute, I figured I'd unpack.

Right now, if you want to publish something electronically, you have three main options - .epub, .mobi (which is to say, Amazon) and .pdf.  In the ancient past, there were no such options, so any game you wanted to distribute electronically was probably a text file or a web page.  PDFs were originally pretty hard to make but got easier and easier over time to the point where they're very nearly trivial today.  The tipping point of their ease also roughly corresponded with the d20 boom and the growth of electronic publication of RPGs. 

PDFs also support heavy graphics and complicated layouts.  That history and feature set have made RPG e-publishing synonymous with "PDF", for good and for ill. 

And there is some ill. PDFs have a lot of technical limitations, especially regarding flexibility (showing the same file on different size devices) and accessibility. ebook formats (epub and Mobi) have made different tradeoffs, sacrificing features and designer control in return for flowable designs.  There is also an impression that ebooks are easier to produce, but saying that is comparable to saying that PDFs are easier to produce because I can select "print as PDF" from word.

Which brings us to this google news. I do not think this is going to be directly disruptive to publishing. Google docs is pretty bare bones, and the market is not lining up for its output.  But I think it's going to have a few huge effects:

1) It's going to make more people aware of epub as a format they can actually use. This is probably the single biggest bump.
2) For free products and prototypes, especially ones which really are just PDFs of a word file or similar, it offers an alternative that may be easier to manage.
3) It will increase the number of crappy epub versions of games.  This is actually a good thing because crappy-but-accessible can still be an improvement on "inaccessible"
4) It may end up settling the whole damned epub/mobi split thing. I can only hope. 

Bottom line, while this won't cause a direct transformation, it will increase the footprint of epub, which should help the format grow, and may be enough for it to clear the hump into the mainstream.  No guarantee, but I'm optimistic.