Quote:
Originally Posted by LDBoblo
The thing about ebook readers is that much of the technology for producing them is available. Software for rendering high-quality text has been around for a long time. Yes, the displays will be a bit slow to develop, but there are many other areas of development in the reader space that have gone ignored, even though the software and hardware have been around for quite a while. At a fundamental level, they're glorified text viewers...and the newest Sony readers still do not have real italics. That is just pathetic.
Apologists can try to vindicate the lack of development with excuses regarding financial viability, but as a consumer, I don't care.
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Things like missing support for italics is annoying, yes. It's part of the problem of using a central SDK that some third party provides for you to build a product around, rather than a spec for some common format and functionality. And Adobe won't let you use their DRM if you don't use their SDK (a big reason I suspect Apple wrote their own ePub renderer from scratch). Things that should be in Sony's control, aren't right now without breaking compatibility with the ADEPT DRM.
But when someone comments on eInk displays, I respond to their comment. I wasn't trying to discuss the issues with software development, and the myriad of legal issues that have made software development a minefield these days. That can be a huge rant onto itself. This whole response is a bit of a tangent from eInk to the media format.
The simple fact that DRM has fractured the market and there are multiple formats is not a good thing in the long term. The whole industry has really gotten into a bad position because the publishers don't know what they need for a digital format yet. The technical companies don't know how to cooperate on a format for the sake of keeping the market healthy. And to top it all off, OEMs tend to also be book sellers, and not have a ton of software expertise in this area. They have to buy it (Mobipocket) or partner with someone who has it (Adobe). It's a bit of a mess, but I'm not entirely surprised for a first attempt into digital publishing with an industry that quite honestly, never took the market very seriously until the last year or so.