The London Book Fair 2004 had the future of electronic publishing as the theme of several seminars. Chas Jones reports back.

Electronics manufactures learnt the hard way that standards make commercial sense. But nothing is perfect and next time you struggle with a lapful of remote controls you might dream of the day that standardisation went even further.

The computer business is based on standards. A computer is assembled from numerous separate components provided by different manufacturers that all have to work together. It is something to celebrate that your local shop can take the board or disk drive out of the box, plug it in and expect it to work, regardless of where in the world it was made. Computer standards provide an impressive example of international understanding.

So almost everybody loves standards. In fact the big manufacturers like them so much that they used to want to improve on them. They used to get impatient with the two to three year cycle needed to agree improved standards and ‘enhanced’ them unilaterally.

'Standards creep' used to be a big problem. Happily, an adolescent industry has matured a little and firms now tend to wait. It has helped that new driver software and updated manuals can now be downloaded so nobody has to wait for 6 months for technical manuals to be written, checked and printed. So, improved communications technology is allowing standards to develop faster.

There is one dark cloud in the sunny sky of standards. Microsoft’s effective monopoly of the software business allows large chunks of vital code to remain secret. This is a pity because standards have worked so well with hardware, why shouldn't they work with software? The steady progress of Linux, Open Office and the browser standards used by everyone, including Microsoft, bodes well for the future. A number of impressive voluntary organisations have grown up to set new software standards.

With UK government departments experimenting with open source software there is a chance that we can eventually expect some innovation in the software we use. Once artificial constraints are removed from software providers, the well-established standards bodies that rely on thousands of clever volunteers to make them work could provide the world with some excellent, very low-cost applications to run on the astonishingly cheap computing power that hardware standards have given us.

Standards are moving on. It is not enough that we can now expect our hardware and software to work together. The ambitious target is to get our data to talk to others’ data. We are not talking about broadcasting your bank account details but, for example, enabling a student to move seamlessly between training information from different providers.

There is a joke in the standards business. If you don’t like one standard you can always find another – there are plenty to choose from. It sounds crazy, but it works.

© 2004 Charles Jones