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Originally Posted by Liviu_5
My prediction is still that unless a magic wand appears that takes your print book and makes it digital fast, for free and at your convenience the way cdex say takes your cd and makes it mp3, only strong external pressure from some digitizing behemoth (Google, Amazon, national library...) will lead to widespread adoption of ebooks in the near future.
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I think that, as with MP3s, if the public demands it, the industry will provide it. After all, books are already being created in digital files for printing... creating an e-book format wouldn't be that much more work. Publishers simply haven't seen evidence of enough consumer demand yet, to offset the additional cost (manpower, time, infrastructure, etc) of doing it. When they think they can make money from it, they'll do it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jswinden
What needs to occur is a new eBook paradigm. A lot of you are comparing Apple's iPod and iTunes to eBook sales. Apple's is the exact paradigm from which the publishing industry must shift away. In the Apple paradigm, Apple sells specially formatted songs that play only on Apple software. In the Apple paradigm, you wind up with dozens of companies selling songs that play only on their software.
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True. When most of us refer to Apple and iTunes, we are referring to iTunes' integration with iPods and standardization power, not the specific format. iPods also play universally-standardized MP3s, as well as iTunes' native format.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jswinden
The publishing industry needs to shift toward a paradigm similar to HTML and web browsers...
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Agreed here, too. The ePub format supported by the IDPF is essentially the system you're talking about, and it would accomplish the same goals.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jswinden
I doubt this will ever happen without government intervention and arm twisting. With only one eBook markup language publishers would be more likely to publish books in this format. It would then be up to software developers to develop the eBook browser software that would enable us to read the eBooks. This would probably kill many companies like MobiPocket, but I don't care. There would be plenty of developers interested in developing eBook browsers for profit or for open source.
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In fact, industry support, led by companies like Adobe (InDesign and Digital Editions) and Sony (Reader), suggests that ePub will be accepted as a more-or-less universal format, without government intervention (probably a good thing). Companies like MobiPocket can still survive as retailers, and they can adopt their readers to read ePub files, either for a small price, or for free (and make their money off of book sales).
Money could still be made from e-book reader SW, however, if the company has enough of a valued feature set to offer (indexing, bookmarking, image support, searching, highlighting, etc, etc) to make it worth paying for. Those who don't need all that can use freely-downloadable readers.