Beyond the POD grab: The IDPF should fight Amazon's new eBabel, look for anti-trust violations, and reach out to Google

Jeff Bezos and friends have already bullied e-publishers into dumping non-Amazon formats for the books sold within its main store.

Now we have this month’s POD power grab, the talk of the blogosphere and beyond. “Amazon is a latter day mill owner,” writes consultant Michael Cairnes, former president of R.R. Bowker, in his PersonaNonData blog. I agree. The new deal from Amazon is that you’d better use Jeff’s BookSurge if you want his big store to carry your print-on-demand books.

Is there any other nastiness that Amazon can pull off on the E front? Plenty, and ideally the International Digital Publishing Forum, the main e-book trade group, will stop being polite and speak out to get Amazon to respect mainstream e-book standards. I’d suggest the same outspokenness from the Association of American Publishers, with which IDPF often cooperates on such matters as industry statistics.

Bullying ahead for the IDPF’s big stakeholders?

The more Kindles are sold, the more Amazon can bully e-publishers and exert new pricing pressures. Not to mention gouging publishers in the future on promo expenses. That wouldn’t be the best of news for the publishers in the IDPF.

Amazon’s growing influence may also set back the IDPF’s .epub standard for e-books, and that could hurt tech companies, including Adobe—which has been a big .epub supporter.

Nor will Amazon’s pushiness in E help public libraries, which right now can’t even lend Kindle books.

Bringing .epub rendering to the Kindle

Simply put, Amazon as it exists today is a threat to all the main constituencies of the IPDF, and it’s high time that the group mount a major campaign to commit Amazon to making its Kindle able to render .epub natively—without translation.

Just remember the successful Toys “R: Us lawsuit, a strong reminder that Jeff and friends don’t always play fair. Amazon’s adoption of .epub for the Kindle would be one way to show good faith, especially if Jeff Bezos were open to the future use of nonproprietary DRM—or if that can’t be happen, no DRM, which I consider the better solution anyway. While other companies, too, need to do .epub, Amazon is the gorilla and should stop thumping its chest and set a better example. Mobipocket‘s ability to import .epub is no substitute for  native .epub rendering on the Kindle, which could happen in a very short time via firmware updates.

Dirty tricksters in the format area, not just disgraceful treatment of Toys R Us

No, I’m not absolutely dismissing Microsoft or Google or Ingram as Amazon competitors, but Amazon stands out not only because of its size, but also as a dirty trickster. Having led people to believe it would be supportive of the IDPF’s standards, it even went out of the way to introduce a new form of eBabel to try to make captive customers of the Kindle owners.

The IDPF, then, should pursue these issues in public, and meanwhile members such as Overdrive, which already deals with Amazon through a reliance on the Mobipocket format, should resist the temptation to suck up to Jeff Bezos and partner with Amazon in new ways that harm causes like .epub. Repeat after me, guys. Toys “R” Us. Toys “R” Us. The more willing companies are to tolerate the Kindle’s flouting of industry standards, the more vulnerable publishers will be to bullying of the kind that the toy company suffered.

Need to monitor Amazon for possible antitrust violation

Meanwhile the IDPF should protect its constituencies by systematically monitoring Amazon for noncompetitive practices in the E area.

No, I’ll not accuse the IDPF of violations of anti-trust laws—that is for lawyers and judge to determine. But Amazon’s handling of the POD issue suggests that Amazon is well worthy of close watching.

Reaching out to Google—and vice versa

Finally, as I’ve already suggested, Google and the IDPF should both reach out to each other. Google. one of the few companies with the clout to balance out Amazon, could be an .epub powerhouse—to the benefit of both its shareholders and the IDPF. Even Adobe would benefit since Google’s involvement would be a reminder to the world that .epub is a true nonproprietary standard, regardless of Adobe’s extensive participation in its creation. What’s more, being networked oriented, Google could help the IDPF introduce new wrinkles to .epub such as reliable interbook linking and a shared annotations standard. I’ll soon be posting an item by Tamas Simon, a TeleBlog regular, who complains of .epub’s shortcoming and logically points to Sophie strengthens in the network area. I hope the IDPF will listen while at the same time taking care that it does not become an arm of Google, which, by the way, is apparently not even an IDPF member at this point.

Detail: If POD is any indication, Amazon may be less attentive on issues such as QC than it would with a more competitive situation. Read publisher Mary Z. Wolf‘s complaints of past quality problems with Amazon’s POD arm. An indication of Amazon’s similar attitude in the e-book area? In fact, as Jon Noring can document, Amazon’s Mobipocket and Kindle formats are hardly optimal for the highest quality STM publishing.

And a repeat of the usual disclosure: I own a small slice of stock in Google for retirement investment purposes, although this has not prevented me from bashing Google on such issues as corporate watermarks on every page of public domain books.