Quote:
Originally Posted by Barcey
If you're correct Felix I think that Amazon made the correct decision by going proprietary. The advantage of an open standard should be that companies can compete on reader software and bring new features to the market faster yet still be able to play well with others. If the majority just sit back and wait for Adobe their new products will be DOA.
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Historically, going back 60 years and more, proprietary solutions have innovated faster and deployed more smoothly than committee-baked standards, even the standards with actual compliance teeth, which epub doesn't have.
The only area where there has been something of a track record of commitee standards-based innovation is in telecommunications, but it is hardly absolute. (GOSIP!) Even GSM owes its success more to governmental strong-arming than to the quality of the original spec. (Pacemakers!)
As for ebooks, since Amazon has yet to move on implementing anything comparable to what epub3 might someday be, there is no way to tell if their approach will be more succesful or not. Theoretically, they could take the entire eub3 spec, embed it inside a mobi file and wrap it in a proprietary drm and call it kindle next and nobody could stop them.
The thing to remember is that consumers don't buy specs or APIs; they buy implmentations and solutions. Committees and pundits can talk all they want but in the end it is consumers who vote the winners with their wallets.