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I read a lot of computer books and the first thing that occurred to me when reading this article was "how are they going to accomodate all the special formatting found in most technical books?" The answer is on O'Reilly's website.
Quoting from O'Reilly's website, "Why just a few dozen? Besides wanting to limit this to an experimental pilot before committing resources to some not-insignificant ecommerce updates, much of our catalog relies heavily on computer code and complex tables -- two types of content that are not rendered well on most of today's ebook readers. Sure, there are some ugly hacks to make code blocks look a little better on a Kindle, but we're holding out for true monospace font support. Ditto for support of many of the special characters used in books like Unicode Explained and Fonts and Encodings. Even Adobe's Digital Editions chokes on a lot of the non-standard characters we use in many of our books (yes, it's possible to embed fonts, but many more characters should be supported out of the box). Our hope is that in the coming months, ebook readers will improve enough to make more of our titles truly usable for ebook customers."
Does this sound as if O'Reilly is pressuring Amazon to upgrade their ebook format? The mobi format simply won't support the vast majority of O'Reilly's books.
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