Quote:
Originally Posted by charleski
But trying to pretend they've locked their product to their own, proprietary format for reasons of functionality is just insulting their customers.
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You are probably right, but I do wonder if they might use their control over their own format to enable some of their little extras, such as comments, syncing reading location between devices, shared highlighting, etc. Perhaps this can all easily be done with ePub, but I have had my own experiences with trying to add unforeseen features to software while being constrained by existing standards and there are plenty of times you need some tiny change in the standard or else you just can't quite pull it off like you want to. Sometimes the problems are not at all obvious until you are mired deep in the details.
On the other hand, I do think it would be helpful for Amazon to be totally up front about the fact that they are not in the reader business but in the book business. They have no interest (I assume) in putting Sony, etc. out of the reader business as long as Amazon can be the one everyone buys books from. Thus Amazon's development of Kindle-4-XYZ reader software for a wide range of devices. Razors for free! Need some blades??