Quote:
Originally Posted by Anarel
Found this, liked it. Kinda tired of hearing people go, yeah, the Kindle's nice, but because there's no EPUB, it's destined to failure.
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Cane's rant is a pretty typical echo of one current of thought floating around the blogosphere -- the "Amazon has won -- deal with it" crowd. I think he's wrong. Or at least very premature.
[Here's an
alternative view.]
Keep in mind three things:
1) The Kindle rode to its current level of success in a relative competitive vacuum. When it was released in 2007, there just was no serious alternative. The landscape has changed dramatically since then. The Nook is outselling the Kindle, the iPad has sold more units in three months than the Kindle hopes to sell in a year, and many analysts are predicting a sea-change when Google Editions debuts. And at least one analyst (Credit Suisse) has already predicted Amazon's share of the ebook market will eventually fall to 35%, with Apple and Google splitting the lion's share of the rest (and that was before B&N entered the ring).
2) The Kindle depends heavily on the Amazon ecosphere. Separated from that, it's really a rather mediocre reading machine.
3) The international market, which collectively dwarfs the US, and lies outside the Amazon ecosystem. Kindle is late to the party in the EU, and so far is a complete no-show here in China, where ePub and PDF dominate. And remember, Amazon can't even hope to sell the Kindle before it has its ecosphere in place. But even in a best-case scenario (assuming Amazon manages it at all), that will take several years -- an eternity in techno-years. Amazon is to be credited with lighting a fire under the ebook market. But I think that explosive growth is now outpacing even Amazon's ability to control.
Methinks predictions of Amazon's triumph are greatly exaggerated.
Other arguments:
ePub has collapsed into a variety of mutually incompatible formats
Rubbish, even on the face of it. Cane's reasoning here is sloppy. He knows the incompatibilities actually belong to the DRM layer, but he argues in practice it makes little difference whose fault it is, therefore he's free to blame ePub. His argument smells more than a bit like arguing, "My W3C-validated website doesn't render properly in IE6. Yeah, technically it's IE's fault, but since it's all the same in the end, I'll just blame the standards: HTML is crap."
But in conflating the content and the DRM layers, Cane glosses over some important issues. For one thing,
not all ePubs are DRM-encumbered (Google has about a half million of them, Gutenberg and B&N have tens of thousands more).
For another, the primary beneficiary of standardization has almost never been the consumer, but industry. Which brings us to Cane's next argument.
Users don't care about formats, they care about experience. And Amazon pwns the experience.
Here Cane gets it right. Most ebook consumers
do care much more about the experience than formats -- even those who are aware of them. And as far as that goes, yes Amazon
does pwn the user experience (in the US).
Problem is, I don't think Cane's argument is worth as much as he thinks it is, because most standards are determined by industries (or government) for the primary benefit (reduced costs, increased efficiencies) of the industries themselves, not consumers. Whether it be the Reconstruction-era rail industry standardizing rail gauges, or the tech industry developing the plethora of open standards that underpin the Internet, industries set standards primarily to make their own lives easier, not to benefit consumers who, when it comes to determining standards, are generally not even in the loop. (Not that they don't ultimately benefit as well, but only secondarily.)
Any reason why the publishing industry should be any different? It's not like they're strangers to standardization.
And since, as Cane argued, consumers
don't care about format, the industry is free to choose whatever format will maximize its own benefits. But
that the industry standardizes is far more important than
which standard it settles on. I personally don't much care, as I'm not a big fan of any particular format (ePub included). But I do think the day of proprietary solutions has come and gone and whatever the standard ultimately turns out to be (even AZW, if Amazon decides to open it), it
won't be proprietary.
--Nathanael