You'd be better off sticking with ePub as Kindle eBooks are a lock-in. Amazon's prices are no better then anyone else's so it makes no sense to go with vendor lock-in.
Trek Books for Kindle
- Thread starter terpette
- Start date
You'd be better off sticking with ePub as Kindle eBooks are a lock-in. Amazon's prices are no better then anyone else's so it makes no sense to go with vendor lock-in.
I'll certainly buy more of them if I just have to download something instantly instead of driving the 20 miles to my nearest Borders!
Karen[/QUOTE]
You'll need to find a new source for your dead tree copies, it was reported yesterday that Border's in there attempt to satisfy creditors and will be closing the remainder of their stores. I wonder how much longer Barnes and Noble will be able to stay afloat. Bob
Karen[/QUOTE]
You'll need to find a new source for your dead tree copies, it was reported yesterday that Border's in there attempt to satisfy creditors and will be closing the remainder of their stores. I wonder how much longer Barnes and Noble will be able to stay afloat. Bob
I sort of felt the same way until I experienced reading my Kindle books on my iPad and the Galaxy tab i have at work. So I no longer see myself being locked in anymore than anyone else. Besides, if necessary I have the technology to remove the DRM and convert to any format I wish :-)
You'll need to find a new source for your dead tree copies, it was reported yesterday that Border's in there attempt to satisfy creditors and will be closing the remainder of their stores. I wonder how much longer Barnes and Noble will be able to stay afloat. Bob[/QUOTE]
I'm hoping the Nook will be enough to keep B&N afloat. I've been really happy with my Nook and the B&N set and I'd hate to have to deal with whatever happens if they go out of business.
That makes no sense. You can use the nook app on all those other devices too. The sooner Amazon sees their proprietary format and DRM as a liability the better.
Also remember that the nook color/android tablet you're getting for an insanely reasonable price is subsidized by the ebooks they expect you'll be buying on it. If you just root it and buy kindle books you're actively discouraging them from making a 'nook color 2'.
That's just plain goofy..... Kindle's dominate the overall market share for E-Readers and to the best of anyone's ability to tell, will continue to do so. How can you call the most dominate E-Reader and it's format "obsolete" when it is by definition one of the most relevant formats available??
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the Kindle is obsolete. Take off your rose colored glasses and look beyond the lemmings in the USA and you will notice that world wide, ePub is the #1 format. Mobipocket as a format is irrelevant. Take the upcoming Harry Potter eBooks. Mobipocket can in no way at all give you the reading experience you got from the pBooks, ePub can since it can embed fonts and you can then get a quite close experience that's more enjoyable. It is either Watching the Clock or DTI that used a number of different fonts and that made reading the book more enjoyable then it would have been had I read it on a Kindle.
Microsoft realized that MS Reader wasn't up to ePub so it bowed out. Amazon is just trying to hold on because they bought Mobipocket.
I have read a fair bit about people with a K1 or K2 wanting to buy a new touch reader, but do not know how to take their Kindle books with them. That is vendor lock-in.
Amazon are very goo at playing games with customers. They make it seem like the customer is getting something really good when they really are getting something mediocre. It's smoke and mirrors (think Wizard of Oz).
ePub is a more advanced format then Mobipocket. More companies use ePub, ePub sells more world wide. Face it, someday Amazon is going to have to get with the times.
I can strip the DRM from ePub and Mobipocket/AZW. One of the recent Trek eBooks has an issue with italics being missing. I was able to edit the ePub to fix the problem fairly easily. I don't know if it would have been possible at all to fix the problem with the Mobipocket version and if it was possible, it would have been a lot more work.
Well, and I hate to burst your bubble. I'm German and therefore apparently not a lemming, and all I want is a no-frills e-reader that doesn't cost too much, makes it easy to download/access books and enables me to read effortlessly with great contrast. That's what I want, and that's what the Kindle delivers. I've had it for two months now, and I couldn't be happier.
While I have faint ideas of what the terms ePub and DRM mean, a) I couldn't care less about the tech and software involved, and b) finding out would take up valuable time I'd rather spend reading on my Kindle.
Most of the people I've spoken to over here feel the same way.
That might have changed/might change since Kindle is available outside of amazon.com/US as well now.
Exactly. Because vendor lock-in works, which is why the Kindle and its formats won't become obsolete. Because a crap-ton of people are locked-in and there will be more every day.
You're trying to play this argument both ways - Amazon can't be locking people in to ensure the dominance of their format AND that same format is dying and obsolete even thought the biggest bookseller in the world is locking people to it.
You also have this quaint notion that that best format is the one that will come out on top, in which case I point you in the direction of Laserdisc, Betamax, and arguably HD-DVD.
You're right that we would be better off without the heavy DRM and lock-in of Amazon's format, and you might be right about the technologies (did they finally properly enable the embedded fonts on the DTI epub then? Must have be party night over in your house
) but the idea that the Kindle and its format are obsolete is crazy.Maybe they should be obsolete, but in practical terms if you're a publisher and you don't release in Kindle format you may as well go home. The market for it is just too big.
Maybe not obsolete in the "you can get content for it" sense. But they're obsolete in the technical sense, and nothing short of Amazon trashing their content and replacing them all with new files from the publishers can fix that.
So does that mean if you can't find a ebook on Amazon then you're screwed? If so, then I guess that's another reason I can be glad I got my Nook instead of a Kindle.
I'm sorry, but I really can't take anything you say seriously after this ridiculous assertion. I may not believe that the .mobi format is the standard that all e-readers should use (I don't, I think Kindle should support ePub), but I'm not so deluded to believe that such a dominate force in this space such as the Kindle (or nook) is "obsolete" using any meaningful definition of the word.
They were the first major player in this space, they still dominate the market in this space and with their latest agreements to integrate their readers into a huge amount of classrooms, (one example here:http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/article/CA6727284.html )the Kindle is going to be a major player in this space for the foreseeable future.
I've read quite a few books on my Kindle, and I've also read them on a Nook, Nook touch and the Kobo touch and in all those cases, I was able to enjoy reading the books just fine. I'm not bogged down by formatting nitpickiness so I don't get any "additional enjoyment" from any format.
I'm not trying to suggest that .mobi is the best format, or even a good format. The only thing I was pointing out here was your ridiculous assertion that the number 1 eReader on the market is somehow obsolete. I may not even like Kindle or it's format, but I do have to recognize that it's an important player that does impact what happens in the e-reader space.........to claim otherwise is to wear those "rose colored" glasses you referenced.
The ridiculous "obsolete" arguments aside... The above two statements are a gross misunderstanding of how technology and the technology industry works.
First, just because Amazon's current format doesn't do something does not mean that it can't be modified/upgraded to do that. I.e. just because it doesn't support multiple fonts or custom fonts or what have you doesn't mean amazon can't get an engineering staff on hand to enhance it to support fonts, pictures, or Flash if they wanted to. What you don't realize is that, for whatever reason, they either don't want to or have decided that this feature isn't significant enough to waste resources on at this time. If it becomes significant you can bet that they will do it.
Second, claiming that Microsoft's reasons for exiting the e-reader market had ANYTHING to do with them "not being up to" some technological challenge is even more ridiculous than the obsolete claim on Amazon. Microsoft doesn't get to be one of the (if not still THE) largest and most well recognized software companies by shunning innovation and figuratively throwing up their hands and saying "oh well we tried, we can't do it". Believe me they ABSOLUTELY could if they wanted to. Microsoft's reasons for exiting the e-reader market could be any number of reasons, but let me assure you the very idea that they simply "couldn't" isn't one of them.
On the off chance anyone's curious:
The Kindle version of Vanguard: Harbinger used to have major formatting issues. They appear to have been fixed. I just redownloaded it, and italics work and paragraphs are aligned properly.
I know at some point someone on the boards here was annoyed about that.
The Kindle version of Vanguard: Harbinger used to have major formatting issues. They appear to have been fixed. I just redownloaded it, and italics work and paragraphs are aligned properly.
I know at some point someone on the boards here was annoyed about that.
It is stretching the definition more than a little, but it really is a much more limited format. I'm fundamentally opposed to any format that limits my ability to choose how and when I use it though. If I buy a Toshiba Blu-ray player I don't have to re-buy all my Sony Pictures DVDs, and my Mercury doesn't run on proprietary Ford-brand gasoline. Industry standards are good for the consumer and any business that claims otherwise is trying to con you.
I'm not sure I would want my book collection to rely purely on one company maintaining it's interest in the ebook market. Who can say if they'll be a major player in 10 - 20 years time. If you've bought an epub book it's more likely readable in that kind of time frame than a proprietary format. Will Amazon still be producing the hardware then? Do you want to bet your carefully acquired book collection on that?
Any Adobe ePub book (like those from Kobo) can be read on a Nook (once you have the Nook authorized to your Adobe account).
Nook books can be read on devices & in software using the newest version of Adobe's software, but as far as I know only software readers like Bluefire Reader (on iPhone and Android) have updated, and none of the other hardware readers have bothered yet.
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