[notimp]

@geekmaster (now in colors -): "If I were a preacher, I'd be a very bad one" is only wearing the coat for exactly the amount of time you need to rip it apart.

Also - fire and brimstone aren't my best friends, especially when people in here seem to be counting on me to explain to them why "a book" is different than "facebook" - or "that thing Microsoft does".

(Yay, tech bubble!)

Should a company be allowed to own written culture? Or should it be allowed to degrade certain formats so it gets a leg up in selling you the proprietary book of the present (.kfx)?

Should they be allowed to introduce a shift that aims at that goal, by switching the auto delivery defaults on their eReader, without this becoming a public discussion, or even just something thats reported on?

For some reason the perception under which this works is, that - no one would be interested in owning or maintaining such a walled garden, apart from people in the advertising business, so let them - and let us, as users, reap the benefits - which is how the logic goes on facebook. Then all of a sudden facebook decides to rethink itself as a media company.

Those transitions happen.

So here is the thing. The "benefit" this (.kfx) creates so far are artificial. The effects are not. Why do you all of a sudden need server side permissions to use a certain Kindle font (ligatures) or get out of the box hyphenation?

Amazon hasn't invented those concepts, which is another important distinction.

Server side permissions - as in "as a user I am encouraged to ask A. to provide me with a format, that enables those features".

Thats not how books work. Also, thats specifically not "something like DRM" (in the sense of "copy protection").
Thats binding core properties like "better readability" to a membership in a specific ecosystem.

The whole thing has more in common with "trying to patent english grammar" than with "DRM", if you want to draw analogies.

Also - to fight another misconception - I simply don't believe in the "if It were the only format - it would be reversed within seconds" principle.

In fact I want to call this out as "magical thinking".

First, no one drew the line that not releasing creation tools would be a acceptable thing to do - it seems to be accepted, yet it is also the most important single step action to making reverse engineering less viable and more difficult to succeed shortly after a new format goes public.

Second, you are trading a hypothetical ("if we need it the most, it will happen") against further restrictions that have been put into place today ("we arent allowed to make those").

Third, if you decouple publishers interests (wants knowledge on how to make the thing he sells, but also wants more security) and the publics interests (wants to the knowledge on how to make a book be public) - this is nothing short of a powershift, and not even a small one.

Do musicians know how to "produce Spotify?", do labels? Or users? Because thats whats being sold. The "enabling" technology that could be produced for 20k and a server rack - becomes a service and suddenly is selling it under a brand, for percentages of revenue.

Thats not the entire issue, but it is part of it. It is also why you can't watch Amazon Prime movies on Apple TVs - as Jeff Bezos admitted quite recently. Because when Amazon, Google and Apple talk about getting percentages of in App sales, they see themselves only as three entities providing the same redundant service and in no way an additive value. And in that space they are still battling over market shares, which is why you as a customer have to play the content silo/segmentation game.

"But why can't Microsoft make money too?" you ask. By phasing out .exe because some program features should only be available in proprietary formats - that would mostly be available through an integrated windows store?

Because we are talking about books. And those have a societal importance as well as "being something you can sell".

Also - there is the legacy issue you are creating with every step along this way. Once 90% of books on peoples Kindles are in .kfx format, no one will care what Calibre can do with .azw. Because 20 years from now (if you want to, make it 50), the same 90% of books on Kindles will still be .kfx and the respective logic will still tell us, that only Amazon is allowed to understand those.

Understand whats happening here on the process level - don't just stop at "facebook has the same business model".