SAN FRANCISCO — In back-to-back meetings, two groups of electronic-book manufacturers, publishers, software companies and electronics companies will meet next week to push forward standards for electronic books, their content format, distribution and copyright protection.

The meetings could take the fledgling electronic-book industry closer to creating open, interoperable standards. But debates over what format books should use, whether an open-distribution standard is needed and whether the ad-hoc standard process itself is an open one, threaten any agreement.

The Open eBook Standards Committee will present a draft of its Publication Structure Specification, a content format for ebooks drawn up by Microsoft Corp, NuvoMedia and Softbook Press.

Separately, the Electronic Book Exchange (EBX) Working Group organized by consumer-electronics/e-book startup Glassbook (Acton, Mass.) will host a meeting next Friday (Jan. 29) to discuss a draft spec for copyright protection and distribution of e-book material.

The Open eBook group is expected to detail a spec that uses HTML and XML as the basis for a content format. It is also expected to leverage the ClearType font technology Microsoft announced at Comdex last year.

However, at least one member, Everybook Inc. (Middletown, Pa.), stands behind an enhanced version of Adobe System's PDF — which is expected to be unveiled at the meeting — as a preferred format because it offers better resolution.

"We feel we've kind of been on the outside since we're using PDF for its beauty of content and readability," said Daniel Munyan, chief executive officer of Everybook, an e-book company that plans to introduce a dual-screen device in late spring 1999.

Munyan said some of the e-book vendors and publishers may change their minds about using HTML and XML once they see a new technology Adobe plans to present that expands PDF and breaks down the barrier between PDF, HTML and XML. Everybook has been a beta test site for the Adobe technology.

In addition, a few electronic-book companies feel they are being left out of the standards-creation process. They point to the fact that only three companies were involved in writing the draft of the standard — Microsoft, NuvoMedia and Softbook Press — when many companies expressed interest in participating. Other members of the Open eBook group include Hitachi, Glassbook Inc. and Librius Inc., as well as publishers Bertelsmann, HarperCollins Publishers Inc, Penguin Putnam, Simon & Schuster and Time Warner Books.

Sources in the e-book industry told EE Times that the Open eBook Standards meeting is closed to the public. Copies of the group's draft spec are only available under nondisclosure.

Munyan of Everybook believes other parties will have the final say in standards for electronic books. "In truth, after all the committees, the real decision on electronic books will come from groups like the W3C [World Wide Web] consortium," said Munyan.

As for distribution standards, at least two of the major Open eBook Standards group supporters believe their business model depends on proprietary copyright and distribution systems.

According to Len Kawell, president of Glassbook and founder of the EBX Working group, the EBX spec complements the Open eBook spec and is designed to be content-format-neutral, but specifically supports both Open eBook's HTML-XML format and PDF.

Kawell said NuvoMedia and Softbook are not part of the EBX Working Group because they believe a proprietary copyright and distribution system is a requirement of their business models.

Other members of the EBX Working group include Amazon.com, Adobe Systems, publishers Houghton-Mifflin Co., Lightening Print and Philips Electronics. Microsoft, HarperCollins and Xerox will also participate in the meeting.

Separately, the American Association of Publishers hired Tenth Mountain Systems (San Diego), a company involved in the testing and development of standards and compliance programs for open network protocols, to provide a security assessment of three electronic-book systems, specifically those of Rocket eBook, SoftBook and Peanut Press, a company that provides electronic books for PalmPilots.

The company will analyze each step in the electronic-book process, from publisher to e-book vendor to repository to e-book device, and any related system interactions, to look for system vulnerabilities where copyright protection might be compromised. A project report will be submitted to the Enabling Technologies Committee of the AAP in February 1999.