Re: Are EBooks a Tower of Babel

2010/2/26 joseph harris <[email protected]>

>
> Perhaps the better question is 'Which formats do my readers use?'. As well
> as 'Which formats do my books work best in?'. Epub was an attempt to make a
> simplification, yet - as I understand it - it is only an envelope easing
> delivery. PDF was invented for printing and ironically has become the most
> frequently used format for ebooks - unless you count websites and blogs and
> so on as ebooks too!
>

I think the best question is, "Are my potential customers going to be able
to figure out what kind of device/app they need to buy to read my formats,"
and its inverse, "What formats will work with the device my customers
already have?'

As I mentioned in my reply, the e-book reader market is a confusing morass
of formats now. There are all these different e-book reading devices out
there, but for the average person, who might be just barely
computer-literate enough to check e-mail and update Twitter or Facebook,
it's going to be very hard to figure out where to buy e-books for a
particular gadget if it's not one of the "big four" (Kindle, Nook, Sony
Reader, and soon iPad). Heck, they probably won't have an easy time even
figuring out what all the formats MEAN, there are so many of them.

I mean, they have to find out what book and DRM formats their reader
supports, then find out what stores sell them. For any given device they
might want to buy. I think that a good part of the reason the Kindle has
sold so well is that it makes things EASY for the average guy. Not only do
they not have to worry about where to buy their books, but they don't even
have to hook the Kindle up to a computer (unless they want to load books
they bought elsewhere, but OTOH that's "advanced class" already). They can
buy the books directly from the device itself and be reading within moments
of deciding they want it.

-- 
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