Will Kindle get ePub support?

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Broken K2s plural? How many Kindles have you broken?

None! Each of the six K2s was a purchase (known to be broken at time of purchase) on eBay - all under $37, five of which still had warranty left on them so they were fixed (swapped out) for free - that I've managed to pick up in the last six months.



Derek

Now if you were talking Bookeen Cybook Gen3s, you'd be able to make a case about *me* breaking them.

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by simplyparticular

Amazon has no financial benefit for supporting ePub (selling or not). The two things that moving to ePub would do would HURT Amazon - borrowing books from OverDrive, and buying from other e-Bookstores. The only way Amazon would support ePub is if it gets forced on them by the Agency 5 or some such reason that would prevent them selling e-Books at all.

And it wouldn't really solve anything, because Amazon probably wouldn't support Adobe's DRM anyway. So we'd have another flavor of ePub DRM to contend with.

And Derek is angry because B&N won't fix his bought-off-eBay Nook's broken screen, not because they won't honor a warranty. B&N doesn't fix screens as part of the warranty, PERIOD. In fact, they don't repair Nooks, they send new ones. I have no idea what Amazon's Kindle warranty includes, but I'd be curious to know if the 6 broken Kindles he's had repaired had screen damage, or other problems.

And yes, there are people who don't contact the manufacturer and put it up on eBay and buy a new one. They have deeper pockets than mine

Hold the presses! Sending an email direct to Leonard Riggio has resulted in an RMA!

Derek

[Alisa]

Originally Posted by simplyparticular

And yes, there are people who don't contact the manufacturer and put it up on eBay and buy a new one. They have deeper pockets than mine

It seems to me that ebaying something is more work than simply emailing Amazon customer service and getting an RMA. The truly lazy thing to do would be to chuck the broken Kindle in the trash. If they're willing to lose the value of the RMA, thirty odd dollars can't be worth much time to them.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by kjk

I agree that seems more likely. And Amazon could probably dictate any terms they wanted with Overdrive, not the other way around, if Amazon saw a marketing advantage in doing it.

Still not clear what business advantage Amazon really gains by supporting any format other than their own. (I can see the advantages for ebook diehards, of course).

They gain because of Kindle's connection with the Amazon ebook store. Every time the book someone wants to borrow is checked out to someone else, or the borrowing period expires before the reader is able to finish, or it is a title the library does not have available in their collection, there will be a likelihood of purchasing it from Amazon. Why do you think publishers, and other ebook reader manufacturers, support this feature? Because it results in additional sales, driven by scarcity of an artificially limited ('free') resource.

Some libraries have already taken to purchasing Kindles, preloading them with content, and letting patrons check out a Kindle as if it were a book (yes, after being unlinked from the library's amazon account! <g>). It's cheaper and less technically involved for everyone than using Overdrive. So that's another angle patrons might query about with their library.

Philanthropically minded patrons might even donate their old Kindles to their local library to get them started.

[eboyhan]

If you want to understand how Amazon might respond to the OP's original question, you need to understand something about their business, and how they're doing at it.

Many of us (myself included) have probably thought of Amazon primarily as a purveyor of books. That was true in the past, but it is not true now and will be even less so as they go forward. Last year only 45% of their revenues came from "media" (which also includes music and video -- so books presumably are quite a bit less than 45% of revenues). 45% of revenues comes from the sale of physical "things" (including the kindle), and 10% comes from web (cloud) services where Amazon is the largest provider of these services to small and medium-sized businesses.

In terms of growth physicals are growing the fastest, followed by web services with media bringing up the rear (although all segment growth is quite healthy). Income is also growing, but not as fast as many would like because costs are rising faster than revenues. This has nothing to do with the kindle or the eBook business, and everything to do with the rapid growth in the physicals business. Amazon is having to build this year 13 new fulfillment centers (a 30/% increase) just to keep up with the increase in the physicals side of things.

With all of that as prolog, Amazon would like the book business to grow, but their primary focus is on fostering a shift from the sale of physical books to eBooks. Every eBook sale that displaces a DTB sale has much higher margins and takes pressure off a fulfillment center.

Amazon probably looks at the book marketplace as consisting of two segments: mass market books, and everything else (primarily textbooks, technical and professional books -- the original DX target market). The kindles (excluding the DX) are aimed squarely at the mass market.

Some here have pointed out that ePub has superior format and layout capabilities as compared with mobi/prc. While true, I believe this is irrelevant when considering mass market books. Mobi/prc is more than sufficient for the bulk of the titles in this segment. As for the professional/technical segment the additional features in ePub are insufficient: the bulk of the eBook titles in this segment are released in PDF format (notwithstanding the problems smaller ereaders have in dealing with this format).

Several have talked about DRM. In a year of buying eBooks (200 mass market; 200 professional/technical), I have yet to come across a single instance where DRM has proved to be a problem. Almost everything from the Amazon kindle store is in the more tractable .prc/.azw format (I think I might only have one or two in the more difficult .tpz format). On the technical side no publisher that I have had occasion to do business with uses DRM. In fact the trend seems to be away from DRM: most technical book publishers seem to be using their DRM-free-edness as a sales feature).

Several have said that Amazon has allowed the mobi format to lie fallow since they bought the company controlling this format. This may have been true in the past, but now that Amazon is sticking their toe into the publishing swimming pool with their DTP endeavor (largely based on Mobipocket Creator and Kindlegen), I expect that will change.

I think it highly unlikely that Amazon will start selling eBooks in multiple formats -- their focus on keeping fulfillment costs low will lead them to offer just the mobi-derived formats. Providing ePub support in the kindle is possible for non-DRM'd titles, but this is easy enough to do (albeit an inconvenience) now. Once the kindle app store gets going, one of the first apps I expect to see is something that will make ePub reading on a kindle possible. EPub books containing DRM are more problematical, and I don't see this as within Amazon's purview.

Library access is a valid point, but I can see no reason for Amazon to put this very high on their to do list -- they would much prefer everyone to buy their own eBook copy rather than borrow it from a library somewhere.

Lastly, I'll just make a couple of comments vis a vis Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I have been doing business with Barnes and Noble for more than 40 years (starting out at their original store on lower fifth ave in NYC); and I have been doing business with Amazon almost since their inception. I have a very generous corporate discount arrangement with B&N -- my company buys a LOT of books). I have to say that over the years I have found Amazon to generally be 5-10% cheaper than B&N. When it comes to customer service, there is just no comparison -- Amazon is so much better; B&N's is by comparison a litany of restrictions. The terms and conditions surrounding the Nook seem to be continuing this tradition.

[tovare]

Originally Posted by eboyhan

...
Some here have pointed out that ePub has superior format and layout capabilities as compared with mobi/prc. While true, I believe this is irrelevant when considering mass market books. Mobi/prc is more than sufficient for the bulk of the titles in this segment. As for the professional/technical segment the additional features in ePub are insufficient: the bulk of the eBook titles in this segment are released in PDF format (notwithstanding the problems smaller ereaders have in dealing with this format).
....

Typesetting is relevant, which is why most printed books aren't a simple printout from Word or plaintext ... even if it's just fiction or poetry.

PDF is not required for the majority of technical titles, in fact ePub is superior to pdf because:

1. Superior reflow and resizing, which is usefull for smaller screens. (PDF's require large screens and is still inconvenient).

2. It's just a zip file, so you can bundle program listings, datasets etc.

3. You can include MathML with SVG fallback.

The only reason you don't see a lot of awesome technical eBooks is the lowest common denominator approach, which is largely due to Amazon's incapable mobi and the fax-machine emulation format called Topaz.

Regards,


Regards,

[Kevin2960]

Originally Posted by eboyhan

If you want to understand how Amazon might respond to the OP's original question, you need to understand something about their business, and how they're doing at it.

Many of us (myself included) have probably thought of Amazon primarily as a purveyor of books. That was true in the past, but it is not true now and will be even less so as they go forward. Last year only 45% of their revenues came from "media" (which also includes music and video -- so books presumably are quite a bit less than 45% of revenues). 45% of revenues comes from the sale of physical "things" (including the kindle), and 10% comes from web (cloud) services where Amazon is the largest provider of these services to small and medium-sized businesses.

In terms of growth physicals are growing the fastest, followed by web services with media bringing up the rear (although all segment growth is quite healthy). Income is also growing, but not as fast as many would like because costs are rising faster than revenues. This has nothing to do with the kindle or the eBook business, and everything to do with the rapid growth in the physicals business. Amazon is having to build this year 13 new fulfillment centers (a 30/% increase) just to keep up with the increase in the physicals side of things.

With all of that as prolog, Amazon would like the book business to grow, but their primary focus is on fostering a shift from the sale of physical books to eBooks. Every eBook sale that displaces a DTB sale has much higher margins and takes pressure off a fulfillment center.

Amazon probably looks at the book marketplace as consisting of two segments: mass market books, and everything else (primarily textbooks, technical and professional books -- the original DX target market). The kindles (excluding the DX) are aimed squarely at the mass market.

Some here have pointed out that ePub has superior format and layout capabilities as compared with mobi/prc. While true, I believe this is irrelevant when considering mass market books. Mobi/prc is more than sufficient for the bulk of the titles in this segment. As for the professional/technical segment the additional features in ePub are insufficient: the bulk of the eBook titles in this segment are released in PDF format (notwithstanding the problems smaller ereaders have in dealing with this format).

Several have talked about DRM. In a year of buying eBooks (200 mass market; 200 professional/technical), I have yet to come across a single instance where DRM has proved to be a problem. Almost everything from the Amazon kindle store is in the more tractable .prc format (I think I might only have one or two in the more difficult .tpz format). On the technical side no publisher that I have had occasion to do business with uses DRM. In fact the trend seems to be away from DRM: most technical book publishers seem to be using their DRM-free-edness as a sales feature).

Several have said that Amazon has allowed the mobi format to lie fallow since they bought the company controlling this format. This may have been true in the past, but now that Amazon is sticking their toe into the publishing swimming pool with their DTP endeavor (largely based on Mobipocket Creator and Kindlegen), I expect that will change.

I think it highly unlikely that Amazon will start selling eBooks in multiple formats -- their focus on keeping fulfillment costs low will lead them to offer just the mobi-derived formats. Providing ePub support in the kindle is possible for non-DRM'd titles, but this is easy enough to do (albeit an inconvenience) now. Once the kindle app store gets going, one of the first apps I expect to see is something that will make ePub reading on a kindle possible. EPub books containing DRM are more problematical, and I don't see this as within Amazon's purview.

Library access is a valid point, but I can see no reason for Amazon to put this very high on their to do list -- they would much prefer everyone to buy their own eBook copy rather than borrow it from a library somewhere.

Lastly, I'll just make a couple of comments vis a vis Amazon and Barnes and Noble. I have been doing business with Barnes and Noble for more than 40 years (starting out at their original store on lower fifth ave in NYC); and I have been doing business with Amazon almost since their inception. I have a very generous corporate discount arrangement with B&N -- my company buys a LOT of books). I have to say that over the years I have found Amazon to generally be 5-10% cheaper than B&N. When it comes to customer service, there is just no comparison -- Amazon is so much better; B&N's is by comparison a litany of restrictions. The terms and conditions surrounding the Nook seem to be continuing this tradition.

Thanks for such a detailed and insightful answer, It's good to hear from those who know and understand the companies, not just histerical opinion,

I guess we pay our money, and take our choice

[mkhan]

B & N deserves to be trashed because they have one of the worst customer services i have ever experienced. I had a few problems a while ago with some ebook i purchased from them. The customer service takes ages to get back to you and guess what, in the end they ask you to call them any way. There is 0 possibility of getting things resolved over email.

Amazon on the other hand, has always provided awesome customer service. And unfortunately for B & N there are enough people who value good customer support that are going to dump a business which takes them for granted. In today's competitive environment, not providing good customer service is committing financial suicide.

[mdovell]

I think some people might become more attached to b&n simply because they are one of the two remaining national bookstores.

borders is simply not doing well at all..if you search for anything about them it just isn't doing well.

b&n is at least trying and we do have to give credit for nook to a point as it isn't a "me too" thing fighting the kindle

Sometimes I watch seinfeld and it shows Brentanos (remember them?)

National stores put a fair amount of smaller ones out of business. Supposedly b&n might put itself up for sale...

if b&n and borders fail and go into bankruptcy one might argue amazon won.

It's extremely hard to run a independent book store. First it was prices and selection but it's also hours. The power of the 3g on kindle can be a real killer app. Can anyone imagine waking someone up at their house at 10:30pm just to read a "sample" of a book?...it can't happen.

Look at what happened with video/movies. Back in the 70's/80's it was a big thing to see a movie on hbo on a saturday night..then it went to going to blockbuster in the 90's...now it's redbox or netflix. Blockbuster is nearly gone..

Some people cannot grasp that brick and mortar can fall to online companies. I've worked at a box store for a number of years and frankly traditional retail environments cannot and will never be as efficient as online retailers.

[eboyhan]

Originally Posted by tovare

Typesetting is relevant, which is why most printed books aren't a simple printout from Word or plaintext ... even if it's just fiction or poetry.

PDF is not required for the majority of technical titles, in fact ePub is superior to pdf because:

1. Superior reflow and resizing, which is usefull for smaller screens. (PDF's require large screens and is still inconvenient).

The only reason you don't see a lot of awesome technical eBooks is the lowest common denominator approach, which is largely due to Amazon's incapable mobi and the fax-machine emulation format called Topaz.

PDF is the only format that can match exactly what is on the printed page. For many high end biology, medical, and other technical books that is the only thing that will do. Lack of reflowability is a problem for smaller devices, but as long as the screen size is equal to or greater than the physical print page size, its absence is no big deal -- the reading experience will be the same as for the printed page.

That said, PDFs do not offer a pleasant reading experience on smaller devices, but reading textbooks on these is probably never going to be a big market. A device such as the Kindle Dx is sized almost exactly right for most textbook/technical book printed page sizes (ISO A5), and the PDF reading experience is good. Non-textual tables, figures, diagrams, photographs, etc are not helped by reflowability, and smaller screen sizes present many unpleasant problems with zooming and panning for these kinds of things.

It is for these kinds of reasons (and also because their internal print publishing workflow format is PDF) that many technical and textbook publishers choose to sell their eBook versions in PDF. I have never had a problem finding eBook versions for many of the technical books that I require. Granted, you won't find many in the Amazon or Barnes and Noble eBook stores, but if you go to the publisher's web site directly, they almost always have a PDF version for sale and download -- and why not? They already have it in this format as part of their internal print prepress processes -- so why not post a copy for sale; it costs them close to nothing to do so; it's low hanging fruit.

I have found very few books in the .tpz format in the Amazon store. I have never heard it described as a "fax emulation" format. My understanding is that it uses stronger encryption and DRM than .azw/prc, but internally it's still using CSS and HTML. You also seem to be implying that Amazon has something to do with eBook format selection -- other than providing the universe of possible format selections, the choice is actually made by the publisher, and increasingly it's the publisher that does the eBook conversion as well.

ePub may have many superior advantages, but they just don't seem particularly relevant to me given the current state of the various eBook marketplaces. Of course this may change, but I think the transition to eBooks is being driven by many factors, and right now the whole ePub discussion is a bit of a side issue.

[tovare]

Originally Posted by eboyhan

...
I have found very few books in the .tpz format in the Amazon store. I have never heard it described as a "fax emulation" format. My understanding is that it uses stronger encryption and DRM than .azw/prc, but internally it's still using CSS and HTML. You also seem to be implying that Amazon has something to do with eBook format selection -- other than providing the universe of possible format selections, the choice is actually made by the publisher, and increasingly it's the publisher that does the eBook conversion as well ...

You have many good points, relevant to todays e-book market and contemporary consumer experiences. Print is really mature and pdf replicates that very well on a large enough screen. (Althoug, I don't really think that the huge text-books with multicolumn text or extra long lines promotes learning)

Amazon does indeed encourage quick'n dirty eBooks via automated conversion;

https://dtp.amazon.com/mn/signin

... Just do it yourself, anyone can be a publisher ... forget all the professionals who come together to make quality books.


The fax-statement was from customer complaints about the Topaz format, citing the font's as being ragged like from a fax-machine. However, as a guy who worked on it says ... it's an artifact of automated conversion:

"The defects in Topaz books are because of defects inherent to the conversion process (which are the same defects which lead to it being converted in the way it exists to begin with)"
http://beesbuzz.biz/blog/e/2010/01/0...evelopment.php

Amazon might need a low bar to ensure that most books are available, but they could and should play nice with standards. There's more than enough publishers who desire to make awesome quality books in digital form.

[nerys]

"Seriously, I'd rather buy a dog, shoot the dog, feed it to the cats, bag and drown the cats, pulp their bodies into biodiesel and waste the biodiesel on an outdoor air-conditioner than use a Sony."

WOW someone hates sony :-) hehe my first reader was the PRS500 I still have it still use it still love it though it pails next to my DX.

the reason I bought the sony was that they did a very "un" sony thing. they made it standardized and OPEN.

it used an industry standard power port (the psp barrel plug is universal to a surprising number of things) My sanyo camera uses it my creative zen uses it my psp uses it my reader uses it and many other things I have use it.

it has a standard Mini A usb port.

it takes SD cards

it reads STANDARD formats (namely prc txt rtf and pdf)

it requires NO SOFTWARE PC SIDE AT ALL.

these were all requirements of mine. My property has to be mine or I am not interested in it. I also HATE proprietary.

I almost did not get the kindle for lack of Memory Card storage but the 3.3gig (not THAT big really) and standard micro usb mass storage access won me over (and it charges via the same port)

it reads txt pdf mobi (lacks rtf and epub)

I also like that while not intended to be user changeable the battery is socket-ed and easy to swap out.

in fact the only thing I miss from my PRS500 was the insane battery life. that damned little sony would run forever. usually once a month I charge it and I use it damned near daily.

the DX has to be charged weekly or more depending on how much reading I am doing.

but every since sony pulled that root kit crap I have shied off sony and any new reader I get has to have a DX sized screen

though I was tempted by that refurb pocket reader from sony at biglots for $100 :-)

sony has gone back to their proprietary practices and I hate it. I was intrigued by their new MP3 player it remedied a lot of the reasons I would not buy the older model but they took out half the features I want and use in the new model. so they upgraded the hardware and murdered the software. How typically sony.

I also got my DX with leather hard cover for $300 (when the new graphite came out) :-)

I do wish they would add native non drm epub support.

I don't do DRM. period. end of discussion. DRM should be illegal and should be outlawed and shunned. I will not support it which means I won't buy it.

Avatar is the only blu-ray I bought and the only one I will buy anytime soon (heck I don't even have a blu ray player)

I just refuse to support DRM. and now they want to remove the ability to output 1080p or ANY hd resolution over Component and force everyone to use updated linked in connected live HDCP supporting HDMI. no thanks.

if that means no new movies then fine I will just download them. My way or the highway and that is how you ALL should be.

[Histerius]

Sorry for stepping into such a good discussion, but does anyone know market shares for mobi and epub. I've been searching around but to no avail, numbers are very fuzzy.