Thread: This is why Amazon is going to win
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Old 11-16-2009, 07:46 AM   #13
luqmaninbmore
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Grauheim View Post
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.
I really don't think it's that big of an issue. The Opus is not a good example because it doesn't have reflow, AFAIK. If I had accidently downloaded a PDF on my Pocketbook 360 or my Sony, I could just reflow it on the device like I do with my library books. And don't forget the latter; Amazon has a really big Achilles heal right now in that they don't support library books (even though it would be easy to do so with mobi-drm). It's very difficult to beat free, especially when you have substantial choice coupled with it. There have been many instances when I haven't had to buy an e-book because it was available from my local library. Also, the other manufacturers are moving to tighter integration of the device and store. We are seeing now with the Sony Daily Edition, the new Irex device, and, most famously, the nook.

Luqman
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