ah, O'reilly. they invented the web now? sure. here he comes tooting his own publishing horn, formats, and software. he'd LOVE to publish his stuff directly onto Kindle, without Amazon in the way, but really, what kind of business logic is THAT [1]? Amazon wants a cut. duh. they took the risks, they did the research, and they killed (IMHO) Sony in the process, they reap the rewards.
[1] well, he can, right now. he could easily, trivially, being who they are, publish their books as mobipocket. RIGHT NOW. without DRM. and put them on Kindle. sell via O'reilly's own webstore, copy and drag and done. several other publishers do this. why not them? oh, the DRM. O'reilly probably insists on that part these days. too much piracy. can't blame them.
afaik, O'reilly is seriously courting Plastic Logic, as they should, and ePub rules on there, as well as most other formats (like PDF), except afaik, mobi
mmm. i sense a slight conflict
i'm going to be in the market for a Plastic Logic device, and it would be awesome to have all my PDFs on it, for starters, as well as say, dozens of computer books (i'd even rebuy them if they were updated).
okay, so a long time ago, o'reilly offered some of their books as .html files, on cd-roms. not all, but some. they then shifted to PDF iirc? currently, they have safari bookshelf, with a LOT of their books online. almost all. the format doesn't matter (html, epub) because they (last i checked), REQUIRE you have a net connection. even on a fast computer, with a fast network, that was kinda dorky and slow. no net? no wireless? yah, no books. lose.
http://bookworm.oreilly.com/about/ '''Bookworm is an experimental platform for storing and reading ePub-format books online.''' ONLINE. only.
given that amazon controls their data, is not a bad thing. at the time of their launch nearly 2 years ago now, and longer from inception, nobody was offering a useful format, and they adopted modified mobipocket. makes sense. they are planning on offering downloads in a variety of other formats, to target other ereader platforms as well. i can easily see how they will also update Kindle in the future, to support epub (it's just XML, and internal to Kindle is Java/XML/Linux, so ... trivial).
Plastic Logic WILL shake things up a bit. still a closed system IMHO. they'll open up some things to let people get more into the thing (developers), but there will be limits, just like with iPhone (and make no mistake, iPhone is not open). apple totally controls what can legally be put on the things via the app store (which includes books). rip your own mp3s? no problem. just like mobipocketing any convertable document or 1000s on line for free. O'reilly implies strong Amazon is not open to this though.
epub is "open". sure. right
to a point. don't get too caught up in all the open source hoopla and love. sometimes it has a way of not working out the way everyone hoped (like those online only requirements). still, it, or something like it, is a good step.
summary: the Kindle is not obscure, will never be obscure as long as Amazon exists as a company, and more importantly, probably won't fail, as long as there's a buck to be made.
exreader