Quote:
Originally Posted by DaleDe
I think you may get your wish in so far as dedicated devices are concerned. With the exception of Amazon and Foxit all the new devices support ePUB (as well as other formats). In addition the products shipped within the last year or so are being upgraded with new firmware to support ePUB as an option.
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I agree. I think the reason though, is nothing anywhere close to the reasons an open formats advocate would use. My estimation is that newcomers are looking to distance themselves from a specific company's proprietary format and most popular formats were created for specific readers or reader software. So basically, if they want to have options that have a low chance of being locked down and reduce the risk of their device being attacked legally over it, they have to choose an open format. Since ePub actually has commercial support, it makes it a pretty obvious choice, even if it's a watered down version that supports DRM.
At any rate, whatever the reasoning, I'm glad to see more support for it. It reminds me of MP3. But this time it's far better. With MP3 it became popular because it was basically the only choice worth using... 12-13 years ago. But at this point, MP3 is one of the lowest quality in terms of audio field reproduction to bitrate ratios. But you can't seem to stop people from insisting that it should always be the format in use. To top it off, it's not even open, it's proprietary! heh...
Well with eBooks, getting popular enough such that a common format is important it makes me quite happy to see a decent format which is pretty well open and understood by software developers working with it. It's a very positive sign for the future of electronic reading.
At this point I would feel entirely comfortable buying a device even if it supported no format besides ePub (though, I'd really like native PDF support for needs that are not under my control... but that's another gripe altogether).