TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home
News & views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics
Amazon’s me-first ‘tude against ePub: Time for librarians to spank Jeff Bezos if he won’t play well with others
Friday, July 30th, 2010
OK, gang. Parse this exchange between USA Today reporter Edward C. Baig and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, amid the ballyhoo for the third-generation Kindle:
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.
Chris Meadows nicely shot that one down. So ePub at one point would not even allow font-size changes? Come on, Jeff. From afar I love the better traits of the new Reader and may buy one myself, and I recognize that the Amazon has its share of positives. Respect for e-book standards just isn’t one of them.
In fairness to Jeff, I’m also grouchy toward the International Digital Publishing Forum, the creator and developer of ePub. He is right about the group’s inadequacies. Two years ago and probably earlier, I myself wrote on the sync issue, suggesting that the IDPF come up with an industry standard (since we’re not talking about format matters per se, I’d have been happy simply IDPF simply recognizing others’ efforts in this area). No such luck. Whatever the reason, the IDPF has been too bleepin’ snailish in the past. I hope that changes, and in fact there are signs it might.
