Amazon says having their own format permits faster page turns - Page 3

bhartman36 · 12-30-2010, 12:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ski_power

As I mentioned in my previous post, I don't think the title was worded correctly

RockdaMan · 12-30-2010, 01:03 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ski_power

As I mentioned in my previous post, I don't think the title was worded correctly

I tried to edit it shortly afterwards, but I could not.

daffy4u · 12-30-2010, 01:06 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RockdaMan

I tried to edit it shortly afterwards, but I could not.

You can report your own post and ask a mod to change it for you.

RockdaMan · 12-30-2010, 01:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by daffy4u

You can report your own post and ask a mod to change it for you.

Thanks. Just remove the word DRM?

daffy4u · 12-30-2010, 01:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RockdaMan

Thanks. Just remove the word DRM?

Yeah. It was the "DRM" that had me confused.

RockdaMan · 12-30-2010, 01:28 AM

done.

dreams · 12-30-2010, 03:11 AM

Title corrected as requested.

Jim Chapman · 12-30-2010, 06:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ski_power

Using Freda and ePub brings the device to a crawl when opening relatively large books like any of the Enders' saga.
For mobi format they have an ancient-relic reader called MobiPocket reader for Windows Mobile. When I use that, the page turns are literally instantaneous (as compared to Freda after disabling the page turn animations).

My take from this is that mobi is a slightly 'bigger' format where the file sizes are comparatively larger as compared to ePub, but for weaker hardware the .Mobi runs circles around .ePub which is what Amazon might have been meaning with their statement.

To be honest, the book format (mobi or epub) doesn't have any impact on the speed of a page turn. The reason why Freda turns pages slowly is that it uses some generic (but quite inefficient) operating system APIs to render text onto the screen. MobiPocket probably uses faster APIs (more coding complexity and more risk of incompatibility with new devices ... but better performance).

Conversely, the speed to load a book does depend strongly on the format used. Here, mobi has two advantages over epub:
1) it uses a compression algorithm that lets you uncompress the book's constituent files one at a time, as you open them (whereas an epub archive is just a ZIP file, which is nice and simple, but which does mean that extracting anything at all from the archive means quite a lot of processing work);
2) mobi files contain much simpler book formatting, whereas epub files can contain XHTML in all its richness, with style-sheets and in-line styles and all. A lot of the time that Freda takes to open an ebup book consists of the time that it spends parsing all this XHTML richness (and then ignoring most of it).

Of course the big disadvantage of mobi is that it is a closed proprietary format. If someone wants to give me some C# / .Net code that will unpack and read mobi content, I will incorporate it into Freda tomorrow ... but otherwise it is just too much of a pain to deal with. Of course, as a software writer I see that as a disadvantage ... Amazon no doubt takes a different view!

Just my $0.02's-worth,

Jim

Barcey · 12-30-2010, 07:52 AM

It's funny he answered the question the exact same way Jeff Bezos did.

It's good to see journalists asking these questions now.

The answer he gave is obvious nonsense though. Technically if that was their goal they could still use an industry standard format and then convert it to a proprietary format to make the screen rendering faster. The end user wouldn't need to know that the proprietary format was used. It's one of those answered designed to sound plausible but isn't.

Of course if he answered, "we do it to make it difficult for our customers to get content from other sources", then he probably wouldn't have a job very long.

DiapDealer · 12-30-2010, 08:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bhartman36

Okay. You're right. I was forgetting that Calibre had to reverse engineer the format to read it. But my point was that the DRM and the format issues are separate. It's perfectly reasonable for Amazon to be referring to the format without reference to the DRM, so it wasn't the DRM that Amazon was saying makes the page turns faster.

And I agree 100% with what your ultimate point was. I was just chiming in on the apparent "proprietary" confusion that was running rampant through the thread.

ski_power · 12-30-2010, 11:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jim Chapman

Conversely, the speed to load a book does depend strongly on the format used.

Jim

Oh yes, I totally forgot to touch base on the loading speed. Mobi pocket does indeed seem to load really fast as compared to any ePub software, oh and don't worry Jim it's not just Freda that does things slowly

I know my Wizard has a super slow processor.

I'm just wondering if the Kindle, similarly has a weak hardware. I do vaguely remember seeing teardowns but cannot recall the processor speeds of the Kindle.

RockdaMan · 12-30-2010, 11:22 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dreams

Title corrected as requested.

Thanks!

RockdaMan · 12-30-2010, 11:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ski_power

Oh yes, I totally forgot to touch base on the loading speed. Mobi pocket does indeed seem to load really fast as compared to any ePub software, oh and don't worry Jim it's not just Freda that does things slowly

I know my Wizard has a super slow processor.

I'm just wondering if the Kindle, similarly has a weak hardware. I do vaguely remember seeing teardowns but cannot recall the processor speeds of the Kindle.

532 MHz on K2, KDX, KDX2, and K3 popped up in a quick Google. 256MB RAM, 4GB Flash.

ski_power · 12-30-2010, 12:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by RockdaMan

532 MHz on K2, KDX, KDX2, and K3 popped up in a quick Google. 256MB RAM, 4GB Flash.

I believe that should be more than enough to get decent speeds for ePubs too.

Now I'm pretty convinced it's just the lockdown factor.

That, or Amazon could look at it for another (possible) advantage. There might be a likelihood of change/improvement in the ePub specs which do not exactly align with Amazons hardware upgrades. Which is another reason for them to go with a custom format (along with the money ofcourse).

Kitabi · 12-30-2010, 12:29 PM

A big thanks to all those who took the time to try and explain Amazon's claim of why proprietary allows them to be faster.

Unfortunately, I still feel this is not a valid reason for now. To my eyes, the loading and page turns are more or less comparable for Kindle and epub readers. I would rather have a single format than these (perceived) speed advantages.

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12-30-2010, 01:28 AM	#36
RockdaMan Banned Posts: 1,644 Karma: 213512 Join Date: Oct 2010 Location: On the other side of over there Device: Pandigital Novel, Kindle G1 (broken), iPod Touch	done.

12-30-2010, 03:11 AM	#37
dreams It's about the umbrella Posts: 25,110 Karma: 56250158 Join Date: Jan 2009 Device: Sony 505\| K Fire \| KK 3G+Wi-Fi \| iPhone 3Gs \|Vista 32-bit Hm Prem w/FF	Title corrected as requested.

12-30-2010, 07:52 AM	#39
Barcey Wizard Posts: 1,531 Karma: 8059866 Join Date: Oct 2007 Location: Canada Device: Kobo H2O / Aura HD / Glo / iPad3	It's funny he answered the question the exact same way Jeff Bezos did. It's good to see journalists asking these questions now. The answer he gave is obvious nonsense though. Technically if that was their goal they could still use an industry standard format and then convert it to a proprietary format to make the screen rendering faster. The end user wouldn't need to know that the proprietary format was used. It's one of those answered designed to sound plausible but isn't. Of course if he answered, "we do it to make it difficult for our customers to get content from other sources", then he probably wouldn't have a job very long.

12-30-2010, 12:29 PM	#45
Kitabi Connoisseur Posts: 77 Karma: 66 Join Date: Nov 2010 Device: Nook	A big thanks to all those who took the time to try and explain Amazon's claim of why proprietary allows them to be faster. Unfortunately, I still feel this is not a valid reason for now. To my eyes, the loading and page turns are more or less comparable for Kindle and epub readers. I would rather have a single format than these (perceived) speed advantages.

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