Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
You missed the point entirely. iBooks is not standard ePub and Amazon doesn't use any sort of ePub. So when the day comes that DRM goes away, B&N's eBooks become standard ePub with Apple and Amazon not being ePub.
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No offense, JSW, but B&N's ePUBs aren't standard, EITHER, as you have to do all sorts of jimmy-rigging to get them to display anything other than plain vanilla (practically Kindle-level) ebooks properly. And whether or not DRM goes away will have nothing to do with what will or won't be a standard ePUB, IMHO. Nor do I believe that DRM will go away anytime soon--why would it? While people (particularly here) bitch and moan about it all the time, they buy books with it; and given that the most aggravating question I get, in conversion inquiries, is (a politely-worded variant on) "how do I know you won't steal my book," I don't see authors pouring into a non-DRM'ed platform.
@seajewel: My point was not intended to be condescending, nor my language, about which I am moderately precise. I believe that your logic argument is incorrectly drawn, given my own experience with ePUB, in which, in the hands of merely two retailers (Apple & B&N), never mind anyone else, you can't really use the same ePUB on two different (but purportedly compatible) reading devices and have it display properly. To me, this is (nearly) the equivalent of two different formats.
Now, you mayn't care if a title page is, for example, left-aligned on an iBooks app whilst centered on a NookColor; nor that the formatting of a heading has to be bastardized to keep Nook from hypenating it in such a way that it ought more properly be called truncated...but from where I sit, what the hell is the difference between that and having to use "start" in MOBI and "text" in ePUB? Or use html in Mobi, and xhtml in ePUB? Or having to tell a MOBI-format book to use .85ems for a header, and type it all in upper-case, while in ePUB you can use smallcaps?
If you mean, from a retail, end-user perspective, that all ePUBs look "alike" on the outside, and that you believe that had Amazon not chosen to go a different route, that now "everyone" would have ePUB as their format, and that this ties into a standardized DRM, fine, I won't argue that point--that's your opinion.
But from a technical standpoint, they're not the same "format." Yes, more or less, they are the same base code; at "heart" they are ePUBs. But while both Apple and Barnes & Noble may sell "dog" format, their dogs are respectively Collies versus Dobermans. Whether or not Amazon sells cats doesn't make a Doberman a Collie nor a Collie a Doberman, and my point was that the big retailers aren't breeding their dogs CLOSER to each other, they are breeding their dogs FURTHER from each other, so that Collies and Dobermans are more disparate daily. I don't think Amazon's decision to sell cats really affected Apple, for instance; Apple was always going to do whatever the hell it wants, as evidenced by the fact that it decided to breed funky collies in the first damn place, that ignored every command they were given.
Sorry, enough with the dog analogy...but seriously, in the guts of the books, they're not the same, and I don't think that Amazon had anything to do with that. If anything...if Amazon DOES adopt an ePUB standard, it will probably have its own foibles, just as Mobi ended up having its own weirdnesses, like two toc's.
Just my $.02, from a book-maker's perspective.
Hitch