Will Kindle get ePub support?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by SensualPoet

I believe Amazon is doing the right thing in NOT supporting ePub at this point. Their customer experience is simplicity. Adding a second format -- pdf or ePub -- complicates what is now a seamless and hassle-free purchase and reading experience.

I would like Amazon to figure out a deal with Overdrive to distribute Kindle DRM books through libraries.

If the world ends up with two formats, well, then, there it is. But there is no reason for Amazon to bother distributing more than one.

Amazon is the one that needs to add ePub to be able to have library support.

[asjogren]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Amazon is the one that needs to add ePub to be able to have library support.

I would be happy with a server-to-server interface where Amazon gets the unencrypted source, format shifts, encrypt with Amazon DRM, and set the expiration to the expected expiration.

Imagine a button on the Overdrive checkout: "Send to My Kindle". Then Amazon delivers. A small charge is acceptable to me if I choose WhisperNet.

Then Amazon could watch the ePub marketplace splinter with B&N having their own variant (for a while) and Apple in a different world.

I want FULL Overdrive support, somehow. My public library has all 3 Overdrive formats MobiPocket, ePub ADEPT, and PDF ADEPT.

[JSWolf]

The reason that Amazon won't go ePub is that people can then buy eBooks with DRM from someplace other than Amazon. Not in Amazon's bet interests actually.

[TomF]

In an interview with USA Today on 7/29, Bezos gave this reply when asked why Amazon didn't support ePub:

Q: Why doesn't Amazon support the popular "e-pub" standard used by your competitors and many libraries?

A: We are innovating so rapidly that having our own standard allows us to incorporate new things at a very rapid rate. For example: Whispersync (which uses wireless connections to sync your place in a book across devices) and changing font sizes.

Other standards over time may incorporate some of these things. But we're moving very quickly to improve the state of the art. It's very helpful not to have to wait for some third-party standard to catch up.

It sounds somewhat arrogant, but if Amazon has their own proprietary format, they can do more with it, rather than a format "designed by committee". You can probably add to the list: annotations, bookmarks, changing font styles, etc.

Amazon's competitors have to support ePub, because they are looking for any advantage they can to beat the #1 selling e-book reader. This may change for Amazon in the future, but for now they're Goliath and they can do what they want. Kind of like Apple.

[Rolando]

I wasn't thinking in terms of Amazon selling epub, I just want to be able to load ePub into the Kindle and be able to read it. Like others have mentioned, by requiring users to convert epub files, Amazon is giving away a competitive advantage to its competitors to do support epub.

[Kindle Addict]

Originally Posted by Alisa

Sadly my library isn't adding any more mobi. Only ePub. I don't know if that's widely true, though.

Same here; something like 6 mobi-format books in the past 6 months, and none in the past two months. Kind of akin to Overdrive not initially supporting iPods because Apple's DRM doesn't support expiry dates. Even today, anyone running OSX misses out on most Audiobooks. Maybe there will be a public outcry and libraries will demand more mobi-format books.

[carld]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

They would gain by helping to kill of Barnes & Noble. That alone is worth every bit of effort in adding epub support to the Kindle.

No, I'm not making a joke.

Barnes & Noble delenda est!

Derek

Yeah, I thought about that but decided not to get into it. People can be touchy about their favored devices.

[carld]

>>1. EPub is a more advanced format, so there's no degredation that I'm aware of going from mobi to EPub. At least all my mobipocket books converted fine.

Amazon's modified mobi is a completely adequate format for ebooks. I've converted plenty of ePubs over to mobi with no loss in quality.


>>2. Converting 700 000 books would take Amazon a few hours. Their E2C Elastic Compute Cloud (Which they offer as a product) could easily convert more than 30 million books every day. (Even as a private individual you can hire 1000 powerfull servers from them for a few hours without prior notice if you feel like it ... they DO have the computing power to do this easily).

I don't know anything about that so I'll take your word that the actual computer time isn't significant.


>>3. A lot of the books are not proofread by anyone, just dumped into the Amazon store by publishers. When customers complain about missing pages and unreadable books, responsibility is shifted to the publisher. Amazon is not a publisher, they take 30% or something for providing a shopping cart and alot of market power. And this is my whole point, someone writes the books in the first place and if that's EPub then all books would have been of a higher quality.

Someone still has to check that the conversions went through okay. You can't mass convert 700,000 mobi files to epubs and then simply throw them back up on the site. And I dispute that books will be of higher quality just for being ePubs. I've seen no evidence that ePubs as currently published have any significant quality advantage over mobi files.

Whatever advantage ePub might have over mobi isn't currently being exploited as far as I can see.

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Why would anyone want to get a K2 fixed at the same price as a K3 with wifi? And it's not much more to get a K3 with 3G. So really, broken K2s are to be tossed out. They have no use at all.

Why would you buy a broken nook?

Six broken K2s. Average purchase cost to me: $37. Five repaired at warranteed NO COST. One at $135. So spreading out the cost of that one repair over six units means that my 'average' additional cost was $22.50. So I now have (or rather had as most of them were given to friends as gifts) K2s that cost *me* $59.50 each. MUCH cheaper than buying a new one at this point.

They are fully functional so that means that to have tossed them away - or the opportunity - would have been almost criminally stupid.

And I know that Mom prefers ePub and is getting tired of her PRS-500.

Besides, you don't just sh*t-can a warranty because the original owner has sold/given the unit to someone else!

Derek

And yes, $189 for the 3G version is NOT a 'throwaway' price - at least not on *my* budget.

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by TomF

In an interview with USA Today on 7/29, Bezos gave this reply when asked why Amazon didn't support ePub:

It sounds somewhat arrogant, but if Amazon has their own proprietary format, they can do more with it, rather than a format "designed by committee". You can probably add to the list: annotations, bookmarks, changing font styles, etc.

Amazon's competitors have to support ePub, because they are looking for any advantage they can to beat the #1 selling e-book reader. This may change for Amazon in the future, but for now they're Goliath and they can do what they want. Kind of like Apple.

And yet, they haven't. Unless of course you're talking about that abortion known as Topaz. Mobi isn't all *that* great an ebook format anyway. I agree that most e-ink readers haven't done justice to epub, but it is more versatile.

Derek

[notyou]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

Six broken K2s. Average purchase cost to me: $37. Five repaired at warranteed NO COST. One at $135. So spreading out the cost of that one repair over six units means that my 'average' additional cost was $22.50. So I now have (or rather had as most of them were given to friends as gifts) K2s that cost *me* $59.50 each. MUCH cheaper than buying a new one at this point.

Whoa - where are you finding all these broken K2s? And why aren't the owners sending them in for free repairs themselves??

[catsittingstill]

I would love it if Kindle would support ePub. That would be a big increase in the Kindle's value to me as a customer.

I don't see a lot of immediate value in it for Amazon, however, since 1) it's not like they have ePub books they want to sell and can't 2) they are aiming principally for the non-techie market so most of their potential Kindle customers wouldn't care all that much about this feature and 3) freeing up their moderately e-book savvy customers to buy from other vendors isn't obviously in their best interest and 4) their really e-book savvy customers think it's no big deal to strip DRM and convert.

So only the mid-techie section of their customers really benefits from the move. I'm in that mid-techie section and would love it, though.

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by notyou

Whoa - where are you finding all these broken K2s? And why aren't the owners sending them in for free repairs themselves??

eBay. And I cannot figure it out myself - but as long as I can find them, I'll continue to snatch them up and have them repaired.

Derek

[MangaEbooker]

delphidb96...Why so much hate for B+N? I mean competition is good, you think the Kindle 3 would be priced as it is now if it was not for all the competition? Bet if the Nook did not drop to 150, the kindle 3 would be more.

Monopolies are BAD! They make it so they can charge a super premium because they know they are the only ones with that kind of product...In the end, we get scammed.

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by MangaEbooker

delphidb96...Why so much hate for B+N? I mean competition is good, you think the Kindle 3 would be priced as it is now if it was not for all the competition? Bet if the Nook did not drop to 150, the kindle 3 would be more.

Monopolies are BAD! They make it so they can charge a super premium because they know they are the only ones with that kind of product...In the end, we get scammed.

It has to do with B&N's stupid customer service policies. If they'd just straighten up and do it right, they'd get no complaints from me.

Derek