The civilian toll continues to grow in the e-book format wars. At least for now, Palm Digital Media won’t release a PalmReader for Microsoft’s Smartphones. Once again, OS-related factors are balkanizing and shrinking the potential e-book market. The lowdown from msmobiles.com:
As we all know, Microsoft smartphones don’t have Microsoft Reader (mistake of Microsoft: Microsoft decided that smartphone users are not reading eBooks), and the only serious eBook reader for Microsoft smartphone is the one from our friends from Mobipocket.com. Unfortunately some people already have several hundreds of Palm Digital Media eBooks and they would like to have PalmReader for Microsoft to read eBooks. Here is what Josh from Palm Digital Media said about this topic to MPx200.org:
We continue to evaluate the smartphone platform for Palm Reader but don’t have any immediate plans for a smartphone version. It is something that we would love to develop and release immediately as the smartphone community is expanding rapidly. But development time and cost are factors that we take into consideration as well.
Oh, well, some believe that Mobipocket, which does make a version for Smartphones, offers a better reader than either PDM or Microsoft. You can also buy Tiny Reader, which nicely reads the Project Gutenberg format and other ASCII, for Smartphones. And sooner or later, if Smartphones are a success, Palm Digital will kick in. But meanwhile an unfortunate message is still coming through: E-books are not real books, not when the whims of the software warriors count more than the satisfaction of (human) readers.
Given the connection with the Tower of eBabel, the Smartphone mess is yet another message to the Open eBook Forum to die and get out of the way. Or as a compromise, the OeBF board could promptly ditch the tainted Gold Sponsor system and arrange for proprietary-format defender Steve Potash to resign as president and for standards work to resume for real and lead to a Universal Consumer Format. Then, when new classes of hardware appeared, such as the Smartphones, e-book buyers wouldn’t suffer to the extent they do now. Nor would the e-book industry itself. Yo, Steve! What do you say? Remember, theoretically, the publishers are your company‘s customers. A smooth transition to an OeBF president with a different philosophy would go a long way and turn many of your enemies into friends.
Details: Whether the “Open” eBook Forum continues or not, a new name without the Orwellian baggage of the old one would also help. So would a different executive director–ideally someone who really cares about e-books and at the same time has the right personality for trade-association work. Nick Bogaty, present director, doesn’t. Be nice to him, OeBF. Find him a job where he can happily crunch numbers for the e-book business but not interfere with the growth of those stats.
