|
Amazon won't ever need to provide epub support, unless someone else is offering a substantial collection not available at Amazon.
If Google gets the actual rights to sell orphan & out-of-print books without directly negotiating for each of them (that's what the settlement includes, but it hasn't been approved, and it faces some serious obstacles), it could eventually push Amazon into supporting epub. But unless there are thousands of much-desired ebooks that *can't convert* to Kindle formats, they don't need to broaden their support.
Right now, the indie presses aren't competing with that market, because non-DRM'd ebooks can just run through Amazon's converter. And if Google books are only readable online, that won't be a factor, because they won't be readable with the Kindle anyway. (Unless Kindle's web viewer allows them, in which case, still not a reason to expand.)
But if Google is offering thousands of *wanted* books in epub (... if they get better than raw OCR output for their books...), buyers might get tired of having to send them through the converter. Instead of upgrading their Kindles, they might a Nook or Sony when they want a new ebook reader.
It'd take a huge collection and a fun-to-browse ebookstore to make it worth considering a switch. That, or a shift in ebook standards so that people demand the formatting abilities of epub that are missing in mobi. That'd take publishers providing ebooks in other than basic text-with-ital/bold for ebooks; I don't see that happening anytime soon.
|