Here is the thing.
There was a standards giving body - that made some assessments, and we all acted for a while like those "conceptually" stood for what we all understood under the term ebook.
Amazon - always tried to "break out" of this ruleset (for personal reasons
) - but as long as their formats mobi and azw3 could be reversed by "public actors", we could proclaim that those were still ebooks.
Definition of ebook:
- can be created by distributed entities
- can be created in the interests of distributed entities
- follows open web standards (html based)
- easy to understand and produce even by individuals - because processing power for at least html abstraction is not a problem
- publishers and distributers can try to saveguard their interests via DRM, which is mostly "habitual" (because math), but by an unspoken agreement, this was seen as mostly beneficial for all players. Granted, the "digitalization" process isnt finished - and the system is skewed towards "anyone can remove DRM - after some time" - but from my point of view this is a critical part of its properties, because I don't see culture as the same thing Amazon would describe as "their long tail business". And by long tail In this case I mean several decades.
With .kfx we practically lost all of this. The statement "kfx in itself is unfit (or less fit) for archival purposes" is telling, because it is a breach of the ebook standard - at least conceptually.
Lets look at the other points above (set up by me to be shot down..
) - Amazon broke all of them.
Hence - don't act like you still live in the old paradigm - where we all had a consensus about what "ebooks" were and don't just prolong the same structures that now are used to auto deliver the new default format that goes against the entire original intent.
You even have an internal justification for doing it. Currently.
The first one is a piece of technobabble "I believe they did it to further optimize their in engine rendering".
The second one is "Amazon should be allowed to make money too".
Those were voiced openly in this thread as well.
My initial idea was, that people in here should "mirror" the intent of the original standards giving body at the highest level of consumer interaction - namely "informed users, that still care about formats" - but mods in here stated, that mobileread has no tradition in setting a "common goal" under which to act on.
So if thats not possible to establish - probably the only thing left to do is to establish a notion of "what was lost" (make it the notion of a "fundamental loss" - because it was one) in the ecosystem changes, we didn't talk about, and blame them on the Kindle brand - so at least the notion that "something went wrong" lingers among users as long as possible.
And then hope for the made up "market competitor" with a heart of gold, that gives away product creation rights for free - because *yolo* or because of ethical considerations, or because he hasn't mirrored the Amazon model - yet...
What is an ebook? In not answering this question, you are opting out from taking a stance in regard to current and future developments of this medium. You may all have different reasons for it - I'd argue that most of them arent in the public interest - but you have to understand that nonaction (in the same way bloggers decided not to tackle any of those issues above) is a position in itself.
The problem with promoting "actual" actions (code this, do that..) is that as the kfx reverser mentioned a few postings ago - any action you might set at this point (producing code, releasing code) might result in a worse short term outcome than actually doing nothing.
Because at this point - your best outcome is coupled to a purely voluntary loophole Amazon keeps open and manages in their interest. If you loose their "still handing out old books to those that ask" goodwill - you'll loose functionality.
