The F word: What's the best way to get Amazon to stop its eBabeling and do the IDPF format on the Kindle?

Newsweek’s talking up the Kindle. So is Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist. The Kindle for now is selling briskly and isn’t going away, as much as many people would like it to.

When I get my hands on one, I might actually have some kind words to say in my Publishers Weekly blog—assuming that the Kindle can in fact seamlessly load in books via wireless. Novice e-bookers hate ActiveSync and similar joys. If Jeff Bezos does the right thing—see my thoughts below—he can help e-bookdom and society in general by simplifying the technology.

Kindle adding to eBabel chaos by shunning the IDPF format

And yet ugly format issues arise with the Kindle.

I’ve read conflicting accounts, but my impression now is that the Kindle can read plain text, HTML, SD-card images, but shuns DOC, RTF and PDF, at least natively. As with the debut of the original Sony Reader, which many thought would read DRMed PDFs of books, confusion reigns.

What better indication that we need to tear down the Tower of eBabel?

No one needs special glasses to read P books from Random House or Simon & Schuster, and the same logical should apply to the E variety. I’m all in favor of helping people cope with the many formats now, but the real cure is e-book standards.

The best anti-babel measure is the IDPF‘s .epub format—flawed but worthy of efforts to improve it.

Perhaps Amazon’s Mobipocket can or will be able to do some .epub conversion and then the Kindle can pick it up from there, but that’s hardly a satisfactory solution for the ordinary consumer. What’s more, it’s unclear to me how good Mobi is with .epub right now. Anyone care to do a test with an absolutely current copy of Mobi? Simply letting publishers translate .epub into DRMed Mobipocket doesn’t count. Here’s to .epub at the consumer level!

Turning Amazon around on the .epub issue

I’ll welcome your suggestions, then, as to how the IDPF, publishers, writers, editors, readers, everyone, can register their dismay over Amazon’s brazen dissing of .epub.

How about Toni Morrison herself getting involved? She acts if Jeff Bezos has done literature a favor, but could Amazon actually be harming it with his mix of DRM and eBabel? If you can’t trust books to be readable many decades from now, then they’ll be that less special and serious as a medium. The fact that Bezos sees E as replacing much of P makes this matter all the more urgent. Anyone know a good way to approach Ms. Morrison?

I’m not saying we should ask her to withdraw her Kindle endorsement. But perhaps we can convince her to educate herself on format issues and urge her friends at Amazon to look beyond the moment and get the .epub format on the Kindle. I suspect that a firmware upgrade would work fine for machines already sold. If not, at least future Kindles should be able to read .epub natively; and by “future” I don’t mean, “Wait until the next model”!

A little digression on the IDPF

Mike Smith, the open-minded new executive director of the IDPF, reads the TeleBlog and hopefully we can help him with ideas on the best way for the IDPF to reach out to Amazon to offer .epub capabilities on the Kindle..

In a related vein, I’ll be submitting a list of questions on priorities for the IDPF, and I’ll welcome your own thoughts. Jon Noring, for example, a TeleBlog regular and the IDPF rep for DigitalPulp Publishing, has wisely talked about the IDPF having an annotations standard for .epub and otherwise caring more about interactivity. The IDPF, as I see it, also needs validation procedures for .epub and a logo for software as well as hardware products loaded with appropriate programs; not to mention something that can appear on bookstores sites offering .epub books.

Let’s make e-books as easy to shop for as CDs—a cause that Amazon has set back for the moment, at least at the industry level.

Back to the Kindle—and links of the day

OK. Addressing other Kindle-related matters, here are some links of the day:

—Amazon Kindle might be the worst thing that could happen to e-books?–where MobileRead’s Bob Russell cluefully raises some DRM-related issues.

—The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)—scenarios from Mark Pilgrim that differ sharply from the Newsweek version of the Kindle future (big thanks to Mike Cane for the link!). Hello, Jeff Bezo? Ever read Richard Stallman?

—A thoughtful, mostly pro-Kindle post on the Amazon site from a Kindle tester who calls herself Eclectic Homeschool Mom. She writes: “Have been using my Kindle for about 6 weeks and I must say that it took me only a few hours to totally fall in love with it. I curl up in my lounge chair with some hot tea next to me and get lost in a world of reading.”

—Other feedback about the Kindle on the Amazon site, with more than a few people griping about the lack of native PDF support. Is the solution just to use Mobipocket to convert books to PDF? Even Eclectic Homeschool Mom knocks Amazon for this eBabel-related crime. Oh, and what about DRMed books? Not to mention the hassles that Bezos has inflicted on owners of Mobi-DRMed books. So far there are 324 customer reactions, and the Kindle gets a group rating of 2.5 of five stars. Just how will people feel when they actually get their hands on one? Once again, I suspect, reactions will be mixed.

–The New York Times’ coverage of the Kindle’s unveiling.

—CNet’s less-than-glowing impressions based on a quick hands-on. “The Bottom Line: With its built-in wireless capabilities and PC-free operation, Amazon’s Kindle is a promising evolution of the electronic book (and newspaper, and magazine)–but overpriced content could be its Achilles’ heel.”

—Amazon’s Kindle Reader: The Gap Between Description and Device, in the paidContent.org blog, source of the photo accompanying this TeleBlog item. Paid Content’s Joseph Weisenthal writes: “The first thing to note is that the screen isn