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EBooks: The future of mobipocket/Amazon?
Wed, 19 Dec 2007

I've always been a critic of ebooks -- not the concept, just the implementations we have so far. And by that, I mean the DRM (and to a lesser extent, the stores since there is a much more limited supply of ebooks than real books, and they tend to cost a lot!)

I can live with the requirement for batteries (if not for page turning with e-ink, but at least for backlighting, say) and so on and so forth, and one cannot argue with carrying a hundred books in your pocket. But as in most forms, DRM is just plain evil. Buying a locked down file means that someday it might be incompatible with some version of the application you need, or perhaps becomes unsupported as the source company goes out of business.. or maybe the book just times out or other silliness. As such, I've been stuck with DRM-free ebooks which are much harder to come by -- a very few stores and titles, or using the Gutenburg project, or converting from one DRM type to a non-DRM type if software is available. Painful.

Anyway, with that out of the way (I should just make a standard template used as a prelude to ebook posts) the question remains -- is any of this dire stuff really going to happen?

Well, maybe, and big too. Consider..

Mobipocket Reader has been around for probably nearly a decade now, supporting Palm OS, Windows Mobile (CE, Pocket PC, etc and so on), Symbian and others I'm sure. Amazon bought them a few years back and started moving more content over, so a lot of people took this as a sign of confidence in the platform. I mean, it was hard to get a good catalog of ebooks, and here comes Amazon getting in, so obviously Mobipocket could be a good readewr system to go with.

Fast forward to this month, when Amazon released the Kindle product, a new ebook reader using e-ink. Well, as an ebook consumer I thought I'd take a look at the specs and lo and behold, something as silly as Microsofts PlaysForNotSure is potentially going on -- the Kindle uses a new proprietary format (AZW files or somesuch) downloaded over the air, but also supports _unDRM_ed Mobipocket files. So wait, the latest and newest Amazon product doesn't support their own ebook store, Mobipocket. (ie: You buy a new book, its got DRM on it, and thus isn't usable on the Kindle. By which I mean.. any ebook you've bought from Amazon is only good on the existing devices (PDAs and Windows, say).. but not the new device.

So, is Mobipocket to be phased out? All those customers screwed? Or is the Kindle firmware going to get updated to support the format later?

Who knows, but suffice to say -- this is why DRM sucks.

*sigh* Another year where I'd like to buy some ebooks, but can't.

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Tech: Whats the case for ebooks?
Tue, 05 Jul 2005

People ask me about ebooks a lot since I've been so close to mobile technology over the last decade, so I thought I'd post with some of the pros and cons and then confuse the issue some more. For now, lets just refer to ebooks as electronic-books regardless of medium -- a PDF on a PC is an ebook, just like an iSilo or Plucker file is. Perhaps the web is an ebook that isn't always available quickly -- you can't argue with the value of wikipedia.

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