Quote:
Originally Posted by phenomshel
So, yes, out of all Amazon's titles, the ones with Topaz may be a "small fraction". But in my wishlist on Amazon, I'd estimate at least 3/4 of them are Topaz. Not quite so small a fraction anymore...
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I agree, and I have made the related point in other posts that some categories are more TOPAZ heavy than others.
No matter how many there are, the primary problem is that TOPAZ ebooks are exclusive to Amazon. So if you want that particular ebook, Amazon is the only game in town. Having Amazon create a TOPAZ ebook is convenient for publishers, but it locks out the rest of the ebook market. I have seen a few TOPAZ titles replaced by AZW, when the publisher got round to producing their own ebook, but not very many.
There are two technical hurdles to format shifting TOPAZ
- circumventing the DRM
- converting to another format
In both areas, there is no publicly available documentation from Amazon. The two reinforce each other, since why strip the DRM if DRM-free TOPAZ ebooks are still locked to Kindles and why try to format shift when most (all?) TOPAZ ebooks have DRM.