@notime. I won't say welcome back. I don't like your sometimes almost incomprehensible style of writing and arguing. I don't like your preaching or your habit in the last thread of ignoring comments raising flaws in your argument, going silent for weeks or months and then posting again without ever addressing the comments concerned. I don't like your anti-Amazon bias when all the major vendor's walled gardens suffer from similar potential problems. Hopefully you will do better this time. Because it is both worthwhile and timely to discuss KFX.
I have found that Mobileread is first and foremost a community of people who love to read. Not a community of either activists or idealists, though no doubt we have our share of both. I for one would much rather spend my time reading than battering my head against a brick wall. As one poster pointed out to me in another thread, the best thing about battering your head against a brick wall is that it feels so wonderful when you stop. That is true be that brick wall trying to convince Amazon to take a different approach than kfx or trying to get you to engage and argue logically instead of preach in that last thread.
KFX is a terrible format. It suffers from all of the defects claimed. It does apply DRM to ebooks which it purports to sell drm-free. Using one publicly available key does not change this. But Amazon is a corporation. It has a somewhat unique philosophy in its obsessive focus on customer satisfaction, which wins many friends. But it does this because Bezos believes it ultimately makes good business sense and over time improves the bottom line profit. Conveniently,
THIS ARTICLE appeared today on Nate's blog. So how do we persuade Amazon to use a format we would prefer to kfx? Easy. Convince them that it is better for their customers and their bottom line. Easier said than done. Because kfx does not provide an inferior reading experience. It arguably provides a superior one. It's just that Amazon has chosen to provide enhanced typesetting through kfx rather than add it to kf8. I don't think there is any real mystery as to why Amazon chose to do it this way. I doubt the customer is getting any better reading experience in a kfx book over what could have been provided in a kf8 book. But nor are readers getting any worse experience. Amazon knows its customers. And it knows that the overwhelming majority of them just want a great reading experience on their Amazon hardware, and don't care at all about drm or lock-in or books becoming unavailable or price rises under a future monopoly or of the many future problems that may arise when stuck in a walled garden. Amazon knows it can't please everyone, and doesn't try. Mobileread has members who prefer much finer-grained control of their reading experience. Some people here edit their ebooks. Others want better font installation and control, screensavers, other applications etc. Many members here but by no means all, possibly not even most, care passionately about removing drm, myself included. I, like others, don't like being confined to a garden, not even one as pleasant and friendly as Amazon's. But we are not typical. What we need to show Amazon for it to care about our objections to kfx is that enough customers were dissatisfied, probably to the point of not buying from them. This is simply not true, and no amount of anti-kfx evangelism is going to change that. If Amazon does ever start offering only kfx then at least some here will stop buying from them, particularly if there is no de-drm solution available at that time. Personally if there is a solution available which gives reasonable results I would probably stay with Amazon. But, like Duckie, the first book I purchase from them where I can't remove DRM will be the last, at least until that changes. Unfortunately, it is doubtful that there will be enough like me for Amazon to even notice.
You seem to think that we on this forum are somehow remiss in not organising and implementing some sort of campaign against Amazon with absolutely zero prospect of success. You have no doubt heard the following old saying:
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God give me strength to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
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Whether or not you believe in God or simply in common sense I think you badly need to find that wisdom on this point.