Quote:
Originally Posted by Grauheim
I picked up a couple of ebooks for my Opus the other day. When I tried to load them up, I found I'd made the dumbest of all newbie errors, and that the books were in fact PDF, not ePub. Ouch. I succeeded in "liberating" the first book, and then with a combination of Acrobat Pro, Calibre, Sigil and plain old Vim, I succeeded in turning it into a passible ePub. No luck with the second book, unfortunately.
This is an extreme case, of course, but it made me reflect on just how high the technical barriers are to reading ebooks. I quite routinely need to mess with the format of my books to make them pleasant to read. It is an entire hobby in itself playing with USB cables, Calibre libraries, and making sure everything is backed up correctly. This is enormously far from the pBook world where you just buy a book, open it up and read it.
So Amazon is going to win because they have the only reasonable model - buy your book, and immediately it's on your device and works. The fact that they own both the platform and the bookstore means that they can (at least in theory) make sure that every book they sell formats correctly on the device. And since they are the only supplier of books, they also can host your entire library so you don't need to back it up yourself.
I really dislike Amazon's DRM and closed-world operation. But for mainstream buyers, the competition isn't even in the game.
|
Oh, and Amazon doesn't have a propriety format that you can only read on their devices and software...
I'd love to buy a few books from Amazon, but won't because they are in a format even worse than PDF. I can't even read it on my WinCE device, while I would have been able to read PDF on it.