image “The next move in the ereader space belongs to Amazon. That sound you heard was the air being let out of the Kindle’s tires. Amazon is now forced with the decision to be pragmatic and support the open .epub format or risk being locked out of the market.” – Allen Weiner, Gartner analyst, reacting to Nook announcement.

Reminder: DRMed ePub still won’t be an open, nonproprietary standard. Alas, big publishers are still insisting on DRM.

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9 COMMENTS

  1. I don’t think Amazon agrees… that’s why they are opening up Kindle to PCs, and to other devices soon. They must feel they’re still in the driver’s seat with publishers… and as long as publishers want to sell through Amazon, the pubs only have so much leverage to convince Amazon to switch over. They will literally have to remove and withhold books from the Kindle store to do that kind of convincing… how likely is that?

    Amazon may well see the light eventually, but I’m betting they’re sure they can put it off until it’s convenient for them… not when someone else tells them they have to do it.

  2. Devil’s advocate time:

    1- supporting only drm-free versions of epub confuses non-techie consumers; just stop by the web sites of some of the ebook reader vendors (say, BeBook) for regular examples of customers screaming bloody murder that they bought an epub book at (online site x) and it doesn’t work on their BeBook. When informed that the specs clearly stated it only supports drm-free epub they act like they’ve been robbed and start talking of returning the thing and “getting a Sony”. After the en-masse switch to Adobe DRM, it is the mobipocket buyers who are screaming. Ah, eBabel, huh? The Point? If you don’t support it at all, nobody expects any kind of support. And support costs money. Support expectations cost sales.

    2- Adobe DRM and Adobe book server support isn’t free. Adobe licenses their mobile ADE sdk and they charge for their DRM servers. And online vendors that use their back-end tech also have to pay for that. That is extra *ongoing* costs that the ebook reader manfacturer has to either absorb or pass on and the online retailer has to eat or pass on. Now, everybody assumes that Amazon ebook prices are (on-average) cheaper than their competitors’ because Amazon is subsidizing those prices. All the evidence comes from 2 sources; publishers who swear they don’t discount ebooks low enough for those prices to be profitable and, of course, competitors’ higher prices. Nobody is saying the competitors subsidize their ebooks,bthough, so *they* must be making money at their prices despite paying Adobe or overdrive or whoever to host their books and despite paying Adobe for their DRM, etc, etc. Thing is, those are *not* charges Amazon has to worry about. They own the back-end servers, they own the drm licensing servers, they own the software. Those are one-time costs as far as Amazon book-keeping goes. It just might be that Amazon prices are cheaper simply because they are more efficient, they do it all in-house instead of paying somebody else a cut of the profits. And then, instead of pocketting the difference, they apply it to ebook prices. And that is onlybpossible bevause they *don’t* support epub.
    Just saying, you know…

    3- Here’s a cute one: epub is a nice paper standard. Adobe epub is, however, the defacto flag-bearer for epub in the real world, the only commercial flavor of epub that really matters. (As long as publishers insist on DRM–which is to say, for the forseable future). Adobe epub is not a standard and will never be a standard as long as Amazon doesn’t adopt it. Until then it will be just another proprietary product. With Adobe epub a direct competitor’s proprietary product, Amazon has zero incentive to give aid and comfort to their sworn enemy and thus won’t and shouldn’t adopt epub any time soon. (They’re doing fine without it, after all.)

    Standards have been known to fail, you know.
    And standards fail most often when confronted with a coherent, effective, and *cheaper* proprietary solution. That is why the pundits and standards advocates are so quick to try to railroad Amazon into the epub camp bevause they understand, intuitively if not explicitly, that the longer Amazon holds out, the greater the chances that epub will lose out in the marketplace.

    The problem is, Amazon knows this too.
    They won’t say it though; it’s not good PR to bad mouth standards (even highjacked ones). But it *is* good business practice to fight for your product and to ignore hijacked standards as long as possible. As long as Adobe controls the epub market Amazon will and *should* quietly stay away.

    Will Amazon ever support epub?
    Sure.
    But only when it makes business sense; when it brings in profits. But right now epub support will only increase costs and reduce kindle’s competitiveness, make it a me-too product. And kindle is doing fine without it.

    The future can take care of itself.

    As for epub, I’d suggest its advocates spend a bit more time prying Adobe’s deathgrip off the standard and less hoping Amazon gives away their competitive advantage. Standards are supposed to level the playing field, not deliver industry control to a for-profit player, after all. And Adobe lock-in is not all that different from Amazon lock-in; just not as cheap.

    Just playing the devil, okay?

  4. ePub reminds me of the theoretically advanced, very standardized, terribly trendy OSI 7-layer network model for the Internet. (If you remember it.)

    .prc/.mobi reminds me of the oversimplified, creaky old TCP/IP Arpanet model for the Internet.

    Note which one won. Amazon may be betting on the _simpler_ horse. That’s often not a bad bet. In practice, for text documents with limited graphics, I don’t see any major lack in the .prc/.mobi file format. Since that’s probably 80% of published books/shorter works, it may be good enough. High graphic content works may just stay paper.

    Regards,
    Jack Tingle

  5. The problem with epub is, as others have pointed out, the DRM version is an Adobe proprietary product, and I don’t see much advantage over Amazon’s proprietary DRM.

    While I like there to be a universal format someday, I would hope it will not be the Adobe version. Others may disagree, but I’d rather Amazon rule the format than Adobe.

  6. Amazon could easily add ePub with MOBI (or TOPAZ) DRM to the Kindle, and most Kindle owners would not notice. They already support AZW (MOBI) and TOPAZ without once indicating in the Kindle store that they have two formats, so adding a third would not change this.

    The only reason I can see for Amazon to add ePub is support for technical books that don’t work well in MOBI. This might not be enough of a reason. If the Kindle DX screen size ends up the preferred one for technical books, then PDF is a possibility too.

    Publishers want to go to an ePub-only ebook production model. Either Amazon has enough clout to require them to do MOBI as well, or Amazon can just do the ePub to MOBI themselves. Note that they already have ePub to MOBI tools, although Calibre does a much better job overall.

    Amazon should add ePub to their free conversion service (for DRM-free documents). Their existing tools probably are not good enough to do this, but Calibre certainly is and Amazon can use the Open Source Calibre free of charge if they want.

  7. Amazon will shift to EPUB as soon as they devise their own DRM scheme that they can use to lock their EPUB ebooks. Paying Adobe a piece of every ebook sold is not in Amazon’s game plan.

    This new DRM-ed ebook format may be coming soon to a Kindle near you:

    EPUBAZON

    And then Amazon will be able to brag that they do EPUB, the same way B&N and Sony are bragging.

    But of course, it will be a child of EPUB — a bastard EPUB deformed by DRM — as different from its idealist father as the Frankenstein monster is different from Victor Frankenstein.

    Michael Pastore
    50 Benefits of Ebooks

  8. Mr Tingle: You’re dating yourself! 🙂
    Been ages since I heard anybody bring up OSI.
    An *excellent* analogy, though; OSI was an uber-standard mandated by the industry powers that be to accomodate their corporate philosophies and visions. It could do everything except take out the cat and lock the door.
    Trouble is, the customers knew what they needed and they could get what they needed a lot cheaper through TCP/IP.
    Price matters.

    Of course, that was in the hardware arena, so howsabout SGML? That should hit a bit closer to home in the publishing arena, no? (I actually remember the SGML add-in for MS Word.) I also remember the super-expensive document creation/management systems built around the super-standard that could encode everything! Blueprints! Catalogs! Databases! Memos!

    Too bad custmers preferred cheaper Word Processing Software and DTP packages instead. And Autocad.
    They preferred $3000 PCs and $5000 Macs to $30,000 workstations.

    And then the Web sprung up and HTML/XML became the true lingua franca of documents.

    I think SGML still exists as a standard and somebody probably still uses it (it takes time to defray those 7-figure investments!) but in reality the more practical HTML and XML more closely ressemble consumer needs.
    Sometimes its best to let the market overule the comittees.

    The problem with insider-anointed standards is that too often they ignore the needs of the paying customers. (Annotation, dictionaries, end-user typographic controls, price, certification-with-teeth…)

    As far as annointed standards go, ePub isn’t at all bad. Just too imature to build an industry on and now that its been hijacked it’s at risk of never evolving to its full potential. Blame DRM if you will but DRM sure didn’t hurt Apple…

    So far, at least, ePub is far from a *must-have* feature for the industry-leading ebook platform. It may be that the Garter analyst sees the market becoming Kindle vs the world, but I see nothing wrong with that. Bring it on! Let’em bloody each other!
    Competition is good–monoculture is bad. And, last time I looked, iPod vs the world was doing fine by Apple.

    Which brings me back to my first point: Amazon doesn’t *need* to do anything about ePub any time soon.
    If anything, it is up to the ePub camp to step up and bell the cat first.

  9. Dutch leading newspaper NRC Handelsblad launched this week their renewed ePaper in ePub and without any DRM. From now on the digital edition can be downloaded and read on almost all eReaders like Sony, iRex, Bebook, Cybook, Cool-er and all upcoming devices like Que, Nook etc

    Also iPhone and iPod are suitable eReaders when equiped with Stanza. Same for all Android phones with Aldiko.

    Because of the lack of DRM, the ePub version can also be converted into Mobipocket so it can be read on the Kindle as well.

    NRC Handelsblad ePaper http://epaper.nrc.nl

    press release at http://bit.ly/2HAHjS

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