[Web4lib] Amazon's Kindle e-book reader

[Lars Aronsson]

Kyle Felker wrote:

> Kindle uses a proprietary e-book format (.azw files), which 
> makes the kindle store and the kindle ebook reader inextricably 
> coupled.

Aha, similar to iPod+iTunes.  Or your phone + a subscription with 
the phone company.  For total liberty from the phone company, you 
should only use CB (or ham) radio. Unfortunately, there are so few 
people you can call that way.

Bell might have invented the phone (some argue about this), but 
did he also invent the subscription?  The money doesn't come from 
the phone, it comes from the subscription.  That's the important 
innovation.

> What the consumer ebook market needs is an ebook version of the 
> MP3 file format: something that's supported by the majority of 
> the ebook reader hardware, and in which most content can be 
> obtained or easily converted to.  Until we have this, ebook 
> usage is too tied to a particular vendor and service model and 
> too limited in what you can do with it to be appealing.

> Put another way:  vendors and publishers are going to have a 
> hard time selling a lot of ebooks until they stop strangling the 
> market with proprietary file formats and draconian DRM 
> restrictions.  Until this happens, ANY ebook platform is going 
> to have a hard time succeeding.


This might be your wishful dream (and mine), but is there any data 
to prove your point?  We have had "plain text", HTML and PDF for 
ages, which are excellent DRM-free formats for reading text on any 
kind of device, but even if there might be demand, there is very 
little supply. It's so easy to make perfect pirate copies of a TXT 
file, that commercial publishers don't dare to sell a single copy.

Judging from how much larger and more profitable phone companies 
(including equipment makers like Sony-Ericsson and Nokia) are than 
companies that sell CB equipment or even Palm Pilots, I'm not so 
sure that open formats/open solutions will have any future in the 
commercial market.  Skype gets a lot of users, but they don't take 
in a lot of revenue, compared to traditional phone companies.


> than any online ebook store I've been to yet, but there are 
> still titles I can't get in electronic format.

The relevant comparison is: Can you get more with or without DRM?


> kindle...until I remembered that a lot of that stuff is free on 
> the web, and I can already access it on my handheld.

But how much longer will newspaper publishers provide that free 
service, with only advertising money, if they can get more money 
through a subscription deal?

> I certainly won't be buying one.

Me neither.  But I don't really have the choice to buy DRM-free 
e-books instead.



-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se