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Amazon to drop Microsoft and Adobe e-book formats
January 26, 2009 | 12:49 pm
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By Paul Biba
Amazon will no longer be offering e-books in the Microsoft or Adobe formats, according to an article in today’s Publishers Weekly.
According to the article Amazon will only offer books in their own Kindle and Mobip ocket formats. There was no time frame specified for the change over.
The Microsoft format, lit, is pretty well dead, as far as I can see, anyway. PDFs on Amazon are mainly technical books. I wonder how technical publishers are going to deal with this, because the Kindle/Mobipocket format is not very well suited to a lot of technical publications.
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Comments:
IME, the Kindle version of Mobi isn’t even as flexible with CSS and (X)HTML as the regular Mobipocket Creator.
Amazon’s cluelessness about publishing realities is beginning to rival Microsoft’s mid-90s inability to see the Internet coming. As Moriah Jovan pointed out before me, Kindle/Mobi is a tolerable format for novels and other simple fare. It isn’t up handling a lot of content. Also, from the perspective of content creators, it becomes yet another format to hassle with. Who wants to create a product just for one company?
It’s easy to suspect that Amazon is tilting to Mobi because they own it. Microsoft made the same mistake, attempting to control the Internet’s impact by owning the dominant bundled-with-Windows browser. Amazon’s attempt to dominate POD in place of the industry-preferred provider, Lightning Source, has landed them in federal court in Maine facing charges of illegal bundling. Their Mobi-or-nothing policy isn’t going to win them any friends.
Amazon hopes we’ll play with their ball and bat, so they can set the rules. We might prefer to wait until the market gets healthier. Forgo fancy DRM schemes, and there’s nothing easier to distribute than an ebook, particularly after the market settles on a standard format such as epub.
I had asked my public library – which has an OverDrive ebook site – if they were planning to continue to carry the Mobipocket format. (They had just added Adobe’s DRM’d version of the ePub).
The answer I got was yes, until Mobipocket came out with its own DRM’d version of ePub – then they’d switch to that. Could be, “Mobipocket” could become a more robust format, if all it was is a wrapper around an ePub.
i understand the reasons people wail against PDF, but amazon’s stance is ridiculous. the fact of the matter is, PDF isn’t going away, and in fact has basically won in terms of widespread, easy use. the course of action should be to convince adobe to drop the DRM. throwing the baby out with the bath water is ridiculous.