Ever since ebooks and ebook readers became technologically possible, there has been a scramble to create a single standard format and structure that would allow publisher-created documents to be read on a variety of reading devices.

A group called the Open Ebook Authoring Group, made up of the major ebook reader manufacturers, a few large publishers, and Microsoft, among others, released the first Open Ebook Specification (OEB 1.0) on September 16, 1999. The specification is based on XML, or eXtensible Markup Language.

Although the breadth of industry participation in OEB is significant, it is too early to predict whether OEB will indeed become the formatting standard for ebooks.

The OEB Web site goes into detail about the organization and specification. For our purposes, it is important to note several things:

1. The specification is non-proprietary and non-commercial, like HTML and XML. It is not a language per se, but rather an encoding scheme.
2. Open Ebook reading systems are not required to support PDF (Adobe's Portable Document Format), or any other non-OEB file format. The creation of tools to convert files from PDF, or Quark, or any other application, is left entirely to third parties.
3. OEB does not address copyright protection or Digital Rights Management (DRM).