Amazon and DRM changes

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by slm

Bear in mind that using ADE DRM would cost Amazon money and reduce the profit on each book.

Yes, but expanding their market to non-Kindle owners would have balanced that. They just wanted their locked-down system more than they wanted to include non-Kindle users.

[C-novice]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

I agree with you, but it's pretty obvious Amazon only wants people to read inside their fortress. They want to control every aspect of your reading, to know what and how you read to the last period and comma. Otherwise why all this messing with proprietary formats? They could just have sold epubs from the start.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if they removed Download & Transfer entirely in the near future. If anything, I'm surprised it exists at all. I guess it was still common for people to have wired internet instead of wifi 10-12 years ago, but that's no longer the case.

Silly question perhaps, but. . . is Download & Transfer only for those who own Kindle reader devices? I asked 'cause I've seen a lot of that phrase in this thread and felt that it must be Kindle reader exclusive so thought to confirm.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by C-novice

Silly question perhaps, but. . . is Download & Transfer only for those who own Kindle reader devices? I asked 'cause I've seen a lot of that phrase in this thread and felt that it must be Kindle reader exclusive so thought to confirm.

Yes, it's exclusive to Kindle device owners, because the DRM is tied to the device.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Yes, but expanding their market to non-Kindle owners would have balanced that. They just wanted their locked-down system more than they wanted to include non-Kindle users.

They have the apps.
More than half of ebooks are read on apps.
Kindle eink has far the biggest share of eink ereaders.
Amazon has over 90% of English language ebook sales worldwide.

So why would they pay a royalty to Adobe for something less good than their own system? They ditched Adobe years ago.

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Quoth

Kindle eink has far the biggest share of eink ereaders.
Amazon has over 90% of English language ebook sales worldwide.

Now, yes. But was that the case when they started with Kindle and ebooks? I was talking about decisions made then. Of course now they no longer have any incentive to adopt epub.

[Quoth]

Sony was biggest number of eink users when Amazon released Kindle in 2007 and it used mobi because that's what the reader was based on. Amazon bought mobbipocket the year Sony released first ereader, because mobipocket was biggest seller of ebooks (PC, Symbian, Windows CE and Palm OS). The azw3 used improved encryption over azw (often mobi with more encryption), and was basically similar to epub 2, and was releasred in 2011. Later in 2015 approx back-ported to older ereaders except K1, K2, DX and DXG.

Amazon sold ebooks before they had the Kindle. How could they have justified epub rather than azw3 in 2011?

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Quoth

How could they have justified epub rather than azw3 in 2011?

Of course they could have included epub. They just didn't want to. And perhaps by 2011 it was too late anyway, because Amazon was too firmly entrenched in their proprietary system by then. If they ever considered epub at all, it had to have been much earlier.

[John F]

Originally Posted by DNSB

A couple of reasons come to mind. Amazon is a publisher and a retailer—any libraries that are either of those come to mind? That KU authors are paid on a pages read basis so the books have to stay within the Amazon ecosystem to allow tracking that number? That KU has no time limit on a loan? ...

So that is how it is, I'm not sure why it is impossible to change any of those things?

That the vast majority of KU books are exclusive to Amazon? ...

Why wouldn't that fit in a model where Amazon purchases a license?

That Amazon expects to make a profit which is not an expectation for a public library?

Which is fine, but there are 2 other considerations: authors and consumers?

I won't even get into the sad history of the number of ways that people tried to game KU to increase their payments which has resulted in the current pages read algorithm with it's conditions which are not public knowledge?
[/QUOTE]
I haven't heard much complaining about the gaming of the library system?

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by John F

I haven't heard much complaining about the gaming of the library system?

Oh, there was. I still remember that mess. First, when paying was per-book basis regardless of the length of the book, people published thousands of 20-50 pages fluff and serious writers started to complain, because you got as much for a novel with 500 pages as for a short story with 20 pages. The next step was paying per the total number of pages, and soon enough scammers released huge novels with nonsense content (only the first 10-20 pages visible in the Look Inside were somewhat coherent, the rest was more or less gibberish). After that came paying per pages read, which seems to have survived well enough.

The difference between public libraries and Amazon is that everyone can publish on Amazon and enroll their opus in KU, there's no vetting system whatsoever. So there were lots of scammers.

[John F]

Originally Posted by DNSB

... That Amazon expects to make a profit which is not an expectation for a public library?

...

Doing a quick Google:

an average or estimation of cost per typical American taxpayer, suggests to ignore such differences. The current figure should be about $40.00 per capita.

So nonprofit libraries: $40 for a year. $40 / 12 = $3.33? I don't know about other sources of income?
KU $119 for an annual subscription, $9.99 (and going up to $11.99) for a monthly subscription? There may be discounts?

And libraries support other things: pbooks, DVDs, movie streaming, CDs, music streaming, puppets, 3D printers, events, ... ?

[innocenat]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

Of course they could have included epub. They just didn't want to. And perhaps by 2011 it was too late anyway, because Amazon was too firmly entrenched in their proprietary system by then. If they ever considered epub at all, it had to have been much earlier.

In 2007 Amazon wouldn't adopt EPUB because it's too new and MOBI was kinda the standard back then. You did agree with this.

In 2011 when Amazon adopt AZW3, you said it was probably too late anyway.

So you think Amazon to invest in supporting EPUB somewhere between 2007 and 2011, when MOBI was still widely used and is working perfectly fine? This make even less sense.

[ownedbycats]

Why invest in an open format when they can just do their own proprietary thing instead?

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by innocenat

In 2007 Amazon wouldn't adopt EPUB because it's too new and MOBI was kinda the standard back then. You did agree with this.

In 2011 when Amazon adopt AZW3, you said it was probably too late anyway.

So you think Amazon to invest in supporting EPUB somewhere between 2007 and 2011, when MOBI was still widely used and is working perfectly fine? This make even less sense.

Every other ebookstore except Amazon used epub and still does. Only Amazon wanted to develop their own proprietary formats (well, Kobo did too, but they never stopped supporting epub). That says something about their priorities.

[ownedbycats]

isn't kepub basically just ePub with extra spans though?

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

isn't kepub basically just ePub with extra spans though?

It seems so. Trivial to clean.