Quote:
Originally Posted by Andybaby
thats gonna be close to 5-10 years then.
Epub is very Processor Intencive and slow, its made to be converted, and the way the kindle is set up, you can have an epub book and read it on a kindle. It flexability is exactly what makes it convertable to a format that can be read anywhere
Epubs are not easy to create, they look like crap unless you hand code them.
the Kindle is more Open than an Ipod is today even, and Ipods sells like hot cakes. Ipods File systems are still Locked down, you still need their propritary software to use it, and only recently did they pull DRM from their Labels, and that was only by Strong Arming the Music Industry after they took them over. Amazon cannot strong arm publishers yet, and for the moment they want their kindle store locked down and Proprietary, they are simply the best, but the market is still small, they want to sell their devices with their library, grow the market out, and then take over fully, they plan on opening their library soon to Cell Phones, and when they do, I suspect they will start offering DRM free books too.
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5-10 years? Well maybe I'm a lot more hopeful, and in the interim there's pleny of Creative Commons and public domain books to keep me reading on a swathe of devices that are about to be launched in the near future. Bonus is that I get to support new writer's and new methods of publishing.
I do own an iTouch I use for reading at the moment, and you're right, it's absolutely abysmal when it comes to any kind of standards. It was a wrong purchase, made because of monetary restraint and a cheap offer. I wish I hadn't done it now and just held out a little longer and put that money towards one of the new breed of readers about to be released.
As to ePub being processor intensive, I honestly haven't noticed that at all, not on the iTouch I've been using to read, or on my computer. And creating is getting easier by the day, eCub for one allows you to do it all without any hand-coding (although I prefer the hand-coding route myself, which is about as hard as creating a web-page).
I hope your predictions about DRM free books come true, and that's all I want. Fair priced, DRM-free, standards compliant books available in my country from Amazon without ridiculous agreements wherein I may lose my whole library on
their whims. I don't see why I should buy into anything that doesn't satisfy my needs (I already did that with the iTouch and I won't be doing it again).