[andym]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I'm not sure I'm with you; iTunes has been a great success. It would be a thoroughly satisfactory situation (IMHO) if a single standard, such as MobiPocket, came to dominate through simple dominance of the market, as Apple has done for music. A def facto standard is just as much as standard as a de jure one, after all.

There's a couple of things to disentangle. the 'problem' with iTunes is that Apple control the whole shebang. You want to sell to people with iPods and use the Apple FairPlay DRM - you have to go through iTunes and sell at the price Apple sets. Your only other route to iPod users is by selling un-DRMed MP3s. I don't have a problem with that, but I'm sure if I was a content producer I really wouldn't want to put myself in that position.

Mobipocket is a bit different. It's available on different platforms. You don't have to sell through Amazon/Mobipocket. OK so it's still a proprietary standard but it's a relatively benign one. I'm also assuming that ultimately Mobipocket and Adobe Digital Editions will both be able to read epub documents and so they will be more like competing web browsers.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I doubt you see an all-in-one.

The problem with converged devices is that the form factor is always a compromise. We want our smartphones tiny. We want our ebook readers to have relatively large screens. You won't get that in the same package...

True, but I suspect that single-purpose devices, will be a niche market and most people will buy some sort of hybrid. Which may be a videoplayer/GPS, a phone/MP3 player/ereader (etc etc - your guess is as good as mine).

There is still a market for paper computer books, and outfits like O'Reilly and Associates do just fine. Where the electronic versions have taken over is documentation included with software, as prices and margins on software make includng pronted documentation uneconomic.

True but I'm sure there not in it for charity. I suspect a) they make very good money out of e-boks and b) they can sell direct to the public. (There are also other advantages like being able to road test books as 'rough cuts' and be able to sell chapters or have a subscription service) Personally when it comes to computer books I would postively choose a pdf over a paper book.

Well, some standard has to be the key. I want all concerned to agree on a standard format for ebooks. I want to download content once, and read it on whatever device I have, without worrying about what content is in what format viewed by what software.

OK true, but it looks like epub is going to be the one. (or at least let's hope so). It's independent it's open, it's based on established standards (xhtml etc) and all the major players seem to be coalescing around it.

Books are prepared as electronic content for publication, and it's not that big a deal to generate alternate electronic formats for use as ebooks. (Imagesetters expect PDFs as input to generate the files that are used to make plates for printing.)

Erm well maybe - how many publishers seem to be capable of producing a reflowable pdf- never mind producing the same document in .prc bbeb etc etc etc? Make producing an ebook as simply as producing a pdf and the standard as ubiquitous as pdfs and everyone's happy.

Publishers will jump on it if/when they perceive a market, and get past the idea that "electronic format"="piracy".

True.