Quote:
Originally Posted by speakingtohe
[le snip]
I think the real reason Amazon developed their own proprietary formats was to prevent others from selling books that could be viewed on kindle readers. This is overall a sound business decision, but selling epubs would not affect this very much IMO.
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Remember, at the time that Amazon developed its format, epub didn't exist yet. Sony was still using LRF, and you could still buy books in MS's .lit format. Sony converted from LRF to epub about a year (or two?) after the kindle came out, IIRC.
I don't think that Amazon will convert to epub because it would be somewhat expensive to convert all of their books to epub, with, presumably, little real advantage to them. (Keep in mind that Sony didn't have a bookstore originally).
I also don't think that there would be much advantage to regular readers if Amazon converted, since I don't think that there's any chance in [insert hot place] that they would use adobe's drm. Amazon is a high volume, low margin business, and even paying 22c per DRM'd book would be a meaningful hit to their profit on many books. Moreover, this would mean giving adobe significant power over Amazon's products, which no company would like to do - this is probably why Apple went with its own DRM.
So essentially, you would end up with a market having all epub, but three incompatible forms of DRM, which might be worse than the current situation.
Finally, I think epub vs. mobi is not like Beta vs. VHS. It's trivial to convert from one (non-DRM'd) format to another - trivial for sellers and trivial for purchasers. I think it's more like .mp3 vs. .aa4 (or whatever format itunes uses) - switching between these formats is not a big deal.