Quote:
Originally Posted by Bob Russell
When we think about comparing e-book devices, we care mostly about some basics:
* Screen quality
* Battery life
* Size and ease of use
* Supported e-book formats
...
So you might think that lots of formats are very important, but I only care about the following two things:
1) The ability to convert HTML and PDF files for use on the device.
2) Support for my favorite DRM'd format
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Disagree.
Your third item in the top list is "ease of use" and you then write at some length about conversion issues and software. Epic fail - the average user is not going to want to or be able to deal with format conversion. And they shouldn't need to. The average user should never, ever need to consider what format the book they want to read is in, and the fact that they have to do this is a clear indication of the immaturity of the ebook ecosystem. The idea that to read ebooks requires some degree of computer expertise is something that is really going to hold back ebook uptake.
In addition, you seem to be dealing with ebooks as a standalone format, without considering how it might integrate with other activities, for example using office software or how ebooks integrate with web browsing (important to me - see
http://hindesite.wordpress.com/articles/plucker-e-book-workflow ). And yet you assume that using a PC is a prerequsite for ebook reading.
One of the things that the Kindle does absolutely right is remove the requirement for a PC, while making the device even easier to use. What turns many people off of this though, is the DRM and lock-in; very important given the expected life of these relatively fragile devices.
While formats may not matter to you personally, (you clearly don't mind jumping through the hoops that the publishers have set up for you) they matter a lot to me. Discrimination amongst formats and the imposition of DRM is how vendors achieve lock-in, and continuing to support this behaviour is in the long term only going to make things continue as they are.
It is interesting to note that the Big Two (Sony and Amazon) both introduced new formats and DRM with their products, even though existing formats would have done the job just as well, and in Amazon's case, they even owned one of the existing formats!
I agree with your comments about HTML and PDF (yuk) but disagree about DRM - I see absolutely no future in it; it doesn't prevent piracy, it is a huge hassle for the audience, and it increases complexity and cost unnecessarily. The only people who benefit from it are the hardware vendors and publishers
I'd like to see all ereaders support all DRM free formats as a starting point, because I really don't want to have the inconvenience of converting my entire library everytime I change to new hardware supporting different formats. It makes managing a library unnecessarily complex, and I'd rather spend the time reading. besides, have you tried converting
from some of the ebook formats if the source document is not HTML or no longer available? Even without DRM it can be a nightmare - for example, try convert Plucker documents to something else.
I have never bought, nor do I intend to buy, any DRM protected book. Life is short and there is just too much else available to read that doesn't require subscribing to this stupidity.
Formats may not matter to you, but they certainly matter to me - from both a practical and an ideological point of view. I'd never consider them to be secondary at all.