Quote:
Originally Posted by notimp
(Amazon .kfx books aren't books anymore, and took away entire featuresets that have been considered to be part of the DNA markup of books in the past 500 years, also of music (mp3), video (x264) and text (html) in the internet age)
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So I've been trying to figure out what about KFX books makes them less 'books' than, say, MOBI or AZW3 files. I can't figure anything out. So it uses a lower-level renderer than HTML, but that's still higher-level than 'droplets of ink on a page'. It doesn't lose you any facilities wrt paper books other than ones you've already lost with DRMed AZW3/MOBI (e.g. inheritance without corporate involvement). You can't easily copy it or back it up, but, uh, that's hard with paper books too. And it supports better rendering than AZW3, finally bringing back hyphenation without the author needing to do anything special, and with other features like kerning that have been part of the DNA of paper books for, uh, the last umpty-hundred years.
So... what 'entire featuresets' are these? The principal featureset of a book is that you can read it and carry it around with you, and (if you are a philistine without honour or respect for books!) scribble in it or highlight it. I don't think Amazon has taken that away. It'll even use the font of the publisher's choice, though I suppose the ability to force the reader to use that font and only that font has been taken away (unless the book is badly formatted). I don't weep for that loss.
I suppose you can't bend the cover back until the spine snaps. That's a definite loss. But, y'know, I tried to do that with my AZW3 book and I can't do it with that either. You can't print in colour or produce coffee-table books either, and if you spill hot coffee on it you soon find yourself out more than a mere single book. So yeah, that featureset is missing. So is the 'uses up lots of space' and 'smells nice' featureset...
I would far prefer it if we could make our own KFXes and de-DRM them (among other things, making our own KFXes would make publishing workflows a lot easier because Amazon's KDP upload interface is damn clunky and slow compared to doing it directly on the device), but, y'know, none of these things are worse than print books, at all. Doing a print book test run is *much* harder!