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The OpenReader Consortium hopes that many, many platforms will be able to read OR-format books–even $50 Palms. Even if OR won’t run on old Palm machines, we’d like to see third-party developers such as Plucker‘s do appropriate conversion mechanisms. With that in mind, we were interested in a post from Brad at Epublishing Blog:

I can see what eBookCulture is talking about now with perhaps using Plucker for ebook conversion of OpenReader XML based ebooks to a format usable on the Palm OS handheld. Why Plucker? Because Plucker format is open source. Others can make readers and compilers for the format so the format is less likely to die out if one company goes out of business. Hopefully the commercial companies like Mobipocket and iSilo will also support conversion of OpenReader format.

That would be good. Eventually, of course, given the many new wrinkles in OpenReader, we hope that Mobipocket and iSilo and even Plucker will make it the main format. Remember, e-book readers are about much more than formats. We would like to see more competition in such areas as user interface and even aesthetics, as opposed to oft-redundant efforts in the format area.

 
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