Epub coming to Amazon and the Kindle!!!

[vaughnmr]

Nice little rumour floating around on the net:

http://goodereader.com/blog/tablet-s...ndle-e-reader/

Look out folks!

[fjtorres]

Uh, the link says Amazon agreed to let publishers submit epubs. That's nowhere near the same thing as saying Amazon will sell epubs or let Kindles render them.
A long time ago Amazon expressed their support for epub...as an input format for their inhouse mobi creation tools. So this is not exactly new.

Mind you, I've heard that some azws in the Kindle store *already* have an epub embedded within the mobi format so its not impossible Amazon is gearing up to sell "universal" ebooks that might be readable on kindles and epub-based readers that license Amazon's DRM.

But Amazon accepting submissions in epub is evidence of nothing except their willingness to convert epubs to mobi.

[SensualPoet]

This may also be related to the behind-the-scenes handling of e-books as part of the Overdrive deal.

[carld]

Reading the article now, but it would seem to be a big step (backwards, forwards, sideways?) for Amazon. I'm not sure about this.

Spoiler:

Also, without support for Adobe's DRM this isn't going to mean much anyway. Though I wonder how this figures into the upcoming library support?

[abookreader]

hmmmmmmm ..... the plot thickens!

[DiapDealer]

I smell something not very exciting here.

Kindlegen automatically embeds the source in the mobi file (hence the kindlestrip.py script) and as fjtorres said, publishers have been able to submit epubs (which are then converted to mobi's) for quite a while. It sounds like a knee-jerk reaction by someone who doesn't fully understand Amazon's submission system.

[carld]

Well, they do say

soon the Kindle ereader will have the full capability to read ePub books. This news has been confirmed by at least 4 publishing companies we have spoken with during the last few days.

Which, if true, would at least be something. Again though, without DRM support I don't know how much it really means.

[DiapDealer]

I'd love to see it be true, but I'm sticking with skeptical for now.

[KenJackson]

This would be GREAT NEWS, if it weren't a step in the WRONG DIRECTION.

I want Amazon to support EPUB. But I don't have a Kindle. I don't want a Kindle. In fact, I want to not have a Kindle.

Amazon.com's website is wonderful. It's clearly the standard bearer--the ruler against which all other book sites are measured. But they're angling for monopoly control of the ereader marketplace with their Kindle, and monopolies are NOT GOOD for customers.

I guess I can't blame them too much for trying. Every corporation has an obligation to their shareholders to extend their marketshare. But if they keep refusing to sell books to non-Kindle ereaders and swallowing more and more of this market, they will invite government intervention to bust the monopoly (at least in the US). That's always less than ideal.

(Of course, DRM is the enabler here. If no author or publisher insisted on DRM, all books could be bought and trivially converted for reading on any device.)

[Giggleton]

Not being able to render epubs is an inconvenience for Amazon's customers, Amazon is theoretically all about not inconveniencing their customers, it might be said that people who read epubs are not currently Amazon's customers, but that could easily change.

Monopoly's aren't bad per se, but abuse of them might be.

I do hope this also means we can change fonts.

[Barty]

Seems very unlikely they'll support adobe drm. Otherwise they would not have had to do all that work with overdrive to enable library lending.

So the most it means is we won't have to do ePub conversion, which is nice because calibre is slow and ePub is the better format anyway.

[carld]

I don't think it means ePub conversion. If that report is right Kindle's will actually support the ePub format, but my guess is only with Amazon DRM, or with no DRM.

[tomsem]

My guess is that this is mostly an attempt at quality control on Amazon's part, and an accommodation to 'facts on the ground,' not at all an indication they are moving to ePub. They'd rather start with high quality ePub and convert these with in house tools (which they can control, refine and improve) than to insist that publishers do an inferior conversion to mobi before submitting it. Poorly formatted mobi files (and there are a lot of them in Kindle Store) are one of the weak points of the platform, and they need to be proactive about improving quality.

For some reason, Amazon's market share alone has not motivated widespread interest in authoring quality mobi files, and Amazon has certainly not provided tools for doing so (apart from their InDesign plugin, which is not really sufficient). Meanwhile, tools for producing ePub continue to proliferate and improve. There's no Kindle equivalent of ePubCheck, for example. There are no open source projects like Sigil to author Kindle ebooks, nobody is writing extensions for LibreOffice or MSOffice to export Kindle ebooks.

On the KDP side of things, the Kindlegen utility used to build ebook files has accepted ePub input for at least a couple of versions now. While the best results can still only be had by learning the details and limitations of mobi HTML tagging, Kindlegen now also embeds the source that was inputted to Kindle gen, whether that was a vanilla HTML file, mobi source, or ePub source. This gives Amazon more information about how formatting problems arise so they can improve their conversion tools.

As others point out, ePub support alone doesn't mean much to consumers unless Adobe DRM is part of the picture, since it is that which confers portability among the many reading systems that license Adobe's DRM solution. However, using Adobe DRM means sharing revenue with Adobe, which is why Apple chose to use their own DRM for iBookstore, and why Amazon isn't going to do it either, at least when they are doing so well without it. Plus Kindle platform is not just about a different format and DRM, there is a lot of existing infrastructure built up around it that can't easily be mapped to ePub and Adobe's solution, even if they wanted to.

What I would hope to see at some point is the ability to send ePub files to the free conversion service and have them converted to Kindle format using Amazon's best conversion heuristics. Hopefully they'll improve Kindlegen as well, so it identifies problems at the source (a la ePubcheck).

Ultimately Amazon needs to improve mobi so it offers formatting options that are equivalent to, if not identical with, ePub. Further convergence is not likely to happen unless and until DRM goes away.

[James_Wilde]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Mind you, I've heard that some azws in the Kindle store *already* have an epub embedded within the mobi format so its not impossible Amazon is gearing up to sell "universal" ebooks that might be readable on kindles and epub-based readers that license Amazon's DRM.

I thought one of the problems with mobi was that it doesn't allow embedding, for example of fonts.

How, and more importantly why, would you embed an epub in mobi?

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Kindlegen automatically embeds the source in the mobi file (hence the kindlestrip.py script) and as fjtorres said, publishers have been able to submit epubs (which are then converted to mobi's) for quite a while. It sounds like a knee-jerk reaction by someone who doesn't fully understand Amazon's submission system.

I always reformat my books, and generate three formats from the same source: epub, mobi and PDF. To create the mobi books, I first generate an epub and then use that as input for my mobi generator...

So, I don't think this is real news...