Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
You have a very strange reaction to a private company introducing a proprietary format for their own convenience.
KFX will no more become a standard for ebook formats than Topaz did.
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That is a distinct possibility - that plays with the concept, that access and ownership as a universal public demand, holds the power to counteract the system Amazon set up. (Spotify will never, become popular, because people still want to own their music, ...)
But you'd also have to voice, what that means.
This community would have to advice its users to stop buying current (also last gen and potentially future) Kindle models - because they already switched autodelivery to the new format (kfx) exclusively, without as much as an opt out (which we know 90% of users dont use).
Or to depend on Amazon not changing the current distribution loophole of still supporting K4PC, and then jumping through several additional hoops just for the purpose of having to remove Amazons DRM entirely - because, we now agree on at least one aspect of it not being sustainable - on a societal level.
This also means, that you are putting all eggs into the "legacy format" basket, because "it's good, what we are still allowed to understand" - which in return means, that any future development on the format, or features is prohibited, because - we now know, that Amazon is bundling those with new format releases to "manage the message". ("New format, sporting those great new features...").
I argue that that is not a real perspective either.
Furthermore, Amazon has total control of everyone of those aspects - how attractive or viable it is at any point in the future - in part, because reversing their formats just became that much harder, while they now can iterate (produce "new formats") that much faster (Amazon is the only one that can produce/understand kfx books, and this is accepted by publishers and authors).
I'm not in the business to advice Amazon on how to maneuver themselves out of this mess (if thats even what they want, because the business case says, that what they did is
bolshy), but just sticking to legacy formats isnt the answer.
Right now it might be enough to advice against buying of current Kindles and to look out for what the next format brings, but that - might take a while. Auto delivery of the new format is already underway, and the blog ecosystem is telling its consumers, that they want it, because of the new features Amazon chose to stack on top of it. Also kfx isnt an attempt to bring the pdf formula to eReaders (like Topaz), but literally the next iteration of Amazons main file system (kf8>kf10 (kfx)).