Quote:
Originally Posted by Nate the great
*sigh*
Amazon launched an ebook platform which was lightyears ahead of the competition, a platform which solved problems that everyone had previously considered insurmountable, and you are pissed because the file format wasn't perfect on day one.
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How was it ahead and what problems did they solve?
I'm not "pissed", but the system was obsolete at launch (by about 10 years for international text), as it only supported Western Latin/Roman text (with some Scandinavian & Greek characters). They leveraged their dominant by then online paper book selling. They'd simply bought the most successful ebook company (Mobipocket) two years before Kindle launch and basically did almost nothing with the reading software.
I totally understand why they did it and ignored both Internationalisation and the superior epub2 and it's predecessor (used since 1988, public release in 1999 and major 1.2 version about 3 years before Amazon bought Mobipocket).
Let's not re-write history. Amazon succeeded at ebooks on the second attempt not because of innovation, or better systems or a better ereader, by by being already very visible and famous as an on-line book seller and their marketing expertise. Not because they did an ebook eco-system well.
Unfortunately buying up other companies can be offset against tax so for decades Amazon paid no tax. They also used other mechanisms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ions_by_Amazon
See also Microsoft from 1980/81 MS-DOS release (which was bought in) and Apple iTunes + iPod, then Apple iPhone plus operator retail subsidies and data bundles.
Companies that rely on innovation often fail. It's the ones expert at marketing with a clever marketing angle or some exclusive deal with someone already big that succeed.
Amazon didn't need to do eBooks well. They were already well known for paper online sales and Mobipocket (and mobi file format) was best known ebook system before Amazon bought it.