EREC: erotic romance
Saturday, September 08, 2007
Amazon and Mobipocket Get Hard (Hardware, that is)
Just as I find my first novel on Amazon, I am reminded why Amazon annoys me so much. It started with the great and largely unremarked upon 'vanishing' when all non-Mobi ebooks were removed from Amazon in many cases without advance warning. In fact when I asked several small publisher about their thoughts on this several assured me their ebooks were still available on Amazon (they were not).
This was clearly a first move to allow Amazon and their acquisition, Mobipocket, to try and capture the growing ebook market. After all, they make a double profit from Mobi and Mobi-formatted (for a fee) books. Now they are rubbing it in by releasing a new ebook reader that can read only Mobiformatted books.
"instead of using the open e-book standard backed by Adobe it will use proprietary "Mobipocket" software. This means that the e-books to be available as downloads on Amazon.com will only work on their reader."
IMHO this all makes about as much sense as a company trying to trademark and control paper. Except that it seems to be working. Amazon has a tight grip on me as both a producer and consumer--in terms of print books. But I hope the ebook market continues to elude their grasp. I truly think that if epublishing is to remain a haven for niche and small press books the first ebook reader to really take off needs to use interchangeable formats such as pdf.
Edited to add-- And Createspace, Amazon's answer to Lulu.com, only allows sales through Amazon and doesn't seem to include an ebook option at all?
Just as I find my first novel on Amazon, I am reminded why Amazon annoys me so much. It started with the great and largely unremarked upon 'vanishing' when all non-Mobi ebooks were removed from Amazon in many cases without advance warning. In fact when I asked several small publisher about their thoughts on this several assured me their ebooks were still available on Amazon (they were not).This was clearly a first move to allow Amazon and their acquisition, Mobipocket, to try and capture the growing ebook market. After all, they make a double profit from Mobi and Mobi-formatted (for a fee) books. Now they are rubbing it in by releasing a new ebook reader that can read only Mobiformatted books.
"instead of using the open e-book standard backed by Adobe it will use proprietary "Mobipocket" software. This means that the e-books to be available as downloads on Amazon.com will only work on their reader."
IMHO this all makes about as much sense as a company trying to trademark and control paper. Except that it seems to be working. Amazon has a tight grip on me as both a producer and consumer--in terms of print books. But I hope the ebook market continues to elude their grasp. I truly think that if epublishing is to remain a haven for niche and small press books the first ebook reader to really take off needs to use interchangeable formats such as pdf.
Edited to add-- And Createspace, Amazon's answer to Lulu.com, only allows sales through Amazon and doesn't seem to include an ebook option at all?
Labels: amazon, mobipocket
¶ posted at 4:26 PM by Emily Veinglory 4 Comments
