How Amazon’s Kindle might HARM e-books, unless Jeff Bezos wises up about the F word

By David Rothman

Question: What’s as inevitable as promises that e-books will finally take off?

Answer: Predictions that they won’t. And sure enough, the influential TechDirt blog carries a post headlined Still Not Betting on an eBook Revolution.

Who can blame the skeptics? Just read a New York Times, story saying Amazon‘s Kindle e-book machine will use the company’s proprietary Mobipocket format. Nary a mention of Amazon shifting later on to industry specs for e-books, including the planned DRM standards (ideally less Draconian than the current variety)!

Digesting the Times article, how would you feel if you’d loaded up with Adobe format books from CEO Jeff Bezos and friends, but then Amazon said it would no longer support Adobe and wanted you instead to use the house brand, Mobipocket. That’s history, not just a hypothetical, and I suspect that no small number of burned shoppers and publishers are angry. It’s exactly why I keep my own purchases of encrypted books in proprietary formats to a minimum.

Consumer and publisher IQs higher than Bezos thinks

Come on, Jeff. Are consumers and publishers so dumb about formats, about the F Word? Are their memories that short? While I doubt that e-books are going to vanish in the near term from the Amazon-related sites despite some ambiguities about the future, you’re harming your marketing efforts by not clearing up the current questions. People badly want to own e-books for real, not just rent them in effect and hope that formats will last. Simply put, you need industry standards of the kind proposed by the International Digital Publishing Forum in the form of .epub—not perfect but well suited on the whole for e-books.

How can customers take e-books seriously as a medium if eBabel woes may prevent them from accessing them in the future? The better publishers of books care a lot about the permanence of their wares. Alas, if Amazon bungles e-book standards and other aspects of the technology—look at Mobipocket.com’s outrage, apparently DRM-related at least indirectly—Bezos and colleagues might set back the e-book revolution by months and maybe years.

Another eBabel example: Mobipocket’s DT 375 challenges

Now here’s one more eBabel story starring the Amazon-owned Mobipocket. Recently I bought a DT 375, a wonderful tablet based on the Windows CE operating system, but I have yet to be able to use the DT to access DRMed books reliably in the Mobipocket format; the DRM-crucial serial number in my Mobi software is apparently changing.

Last I knew, the Mobipocket site didn’t include an up-to-date version of software fit for the DT tablet, which, after maybe five years, isn’t modern but is hardly an antique. Is the right Mobipocket software for the DT on the way? I doubt it. Tell me otherwise, Jeff. Care to change your mind if recent software for the DT isn’t available? Even without all the clashing formats and DRM standards, e-books can be hard to get right for the long term if you must run software tied to a particular format.

Unless Amazon uses industry standards, I’m just not going to find its books to be fully trustworthy, not when I remember the abrupt shift to Mobipocket from Adobe and the rest.

eBabel questions raised in New York Times story

The Times story—now the most e-mailed article from the Times tech section—did not exactly increase my trust in Amazon.

In Envisioning the Next Chapter for Electronic Books, Times staff writer Brad Stone noted complaints that “Amazon is using a proprietary e-book format from Mobipocket, a French company that Amazon bought in 2005, instead of supporting the open e-book standard backed by most major publishers and high-tech companies like Adobe. That means owners of other digital book devices, like the Sony Reader, will not be able to use books purchased on Amazon.com.”

Why aren’t Amazon and some other major companies out there with the full story—bragging about the forthcoming e-book standards from the International Digital Publishing Forum? Isn’t Amazon supposed to be supporting the IDPF’s epub efforts? And shouldn’t it announce to the world, if the facts justify, that the Kindle will have a future firmware upgrade allowing for use of the format?

Optimism at the IDPF

Just in case Amazon belies previous impressions and won’t back epub, I asked IDPF Executive Director Nick Bogaty for his own take on the format issues at Amazon. Here is what Nick wrote back:

“Amazon is pretty tight-lipped on their release plans so I basically know as much as you do. However, both Mobipocket and Amazon have expressed to me and other IDPF members multiple times as to their intention to implement .epub. I have every indication that they’re actually planning on doing this. In fact, in the Mobipocket Reader 6.0 gives you the option to import OCF files which is the container part of .epub. Reader 6.0 was released before OPS, so I assume their OPS implementation will come in the next version.”

For nontechies, that means, “I’d be very surprised if Amazon veered off the standards path, based on current features in its software and anticipated ones.”

Nick added in a separate note: “I think the point is, as far as I know, they are cooperating and believe the NY Times article was incorrect on this.”

Broken heart over format issues

May Nick be right! He most likely is, but I’ve had my heart broken too many times on standards issues to be absolutely sure, and it isn’t as if, in the opinion of some, Amazon has a perfect record for veracity.

Amazon, thus, could help Nick, me and the entire e-book industry with a strong, unequivocal statement to the Times on .epub and related standards—especially one giving at least an approximate schedule for implementation. That should includes assurances of the availability of software for publishers to use in creating .epub-formatted books, just as they can now use a software tool from Mobi to create Mobipocket ones. Just what are the gotchas? Or are they gone?

Ideally Jeff Bezos will not delay in personally requesting a clarification from the Times, about Amazon’s ultimate intentions, if one is indeed warranted; let’s hope it is.

Otherwise the Times’ influential readers, including no small number of New York-based executives in book publishing, may assume that the Kindle will be an eternal occupant of the Tower of eBabel. Oh, and, yes, compatibility with .txt, .html and other standards commonly used for public domain books would also be helpful.

The DRM angle

eBabel-proofing, of course, should not stop with core formats. Proprietary DRM in effect would set back the IDPF’s initiative to standardize details associated with the core format.

Amazon should emphatically commit in public either to no DRM, social DRM or at least cooperation with the IDPF’s planned efforts toward DRM interoperability.

Bottom line

While other major issues will also determine the Kindle’s success or lack of it, such as whether people like the looks sufficiently, or how well the wireless connections work, the eBabel one mustn’t be neglected. Even a company with some 14,000 employees and more than $10 billion in revenue won’t necessarily last for decades—a timeline meaningful to the better publishers and librarians. I won’t take Amazon’s e-books seriously as purchases if it doesn’t feel the same toward industry standards; let’s hope, then, that the Times piece told just part of the story.

Related: Billions of dollars from ‘Intel Inside’: How the IDPF could learn from the world-famous chip logo and TeleBlog posts on social DRM. Also see Robert Nagle’s earlier item in the TeleBlog and MobileRead’s discussion on the Kindle.