Quote:
Originally Posted by srid
And Kindle may not be a good thing to invest .. for Amazon's ebooks (azw) can only be read on a Kindle.
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That doesn't fuss me. The "format wars" on e-books are nothing like we saw in terms of VHS/Beta and HD DVD/Blu-ray. Let's not forget the other huge DRM format wars: music. Apple -- which everyone agrees won the hardware game and has thrived as a leading distributor of content with iTunes -- started out with a proprietary format AAC, not MP3. Apple eventually moved to mp3 and even to a non-DRM model. I am confident something like this will evolve over time with e-books.
Kindle's sole challenge is the public library market which embraced DRMed ePub. I don't think this is an unsolvable gap and, in the meantime, Amazon's Kindle is thriving in spite of it. I am quite confident buying books from Amazon and embracing its native format, mobi, for the core of my library. However, I am also making "backup" copies of everything in ePub using calibre so whatever device I want to read on, I have an "identical" copy.