Quote:
Originally Posted by tompe
But that is not relevant for the given argument (I should have said might have been able to). The argument seemed to be that just because they could not make a full fledged ePub3 reader they had to make their own format. And that is not a valid argument since it assumes without any evidence that a subset would not have been enough.
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Since I don't seem to be explaining myself very well, I'm going to type this very slowly, in the hope that it will be easier to understand
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Yes, I agree that Apple could probably have achieved what they wanted with ePub 3. I don't know for certain, but from what I've read about ePub 3, it seems like a reasonable assumption to make.
They would then have required a app to read what they had created. They clearly didn't want to produce a full-fledged ePub 3 reader app, because ePub 3 has all sorts of mandatory requirements that were of no interest for the specific commercial purpose they had in mind. So they could not have claimed that what they produced was an ePub 3 reader - it would still be "a reader for iBooks files", not "an ePub 3 reader".
So, we have a situation where we have an iBooks reader app, and a tool which produces files which can only be read by that app. In this circumstance, is there any commercial benefit to be gained from using ePub 3 at all? I would argue that there is no benefit, because by using ePub 3, Apple are opening the gates to other people to develop apps which could also read those files, and hence taking sales away from Apple. In this situation, it makes sound commercial sense to make the format proprietary, so that yours is the only platform that can display the books that your tool produces.
QED.
Amazon have made exactly the same decision with their "KF8" multimedia format.