Amazon uses the Mobipocket format in the Kindle (and bought Mobipocket to get it.) Mobi is essentially an encapsulated HTML subset, with even less capability of displaying the book as originally designed than ePub. Amazon is all about vendor lock in. They use Mobipocket format with a proprietary DRM scheme different from the one Mobi itself implements. If you have a Kindle, or Amazon’s iPhone or PC apps to read Kindle editions, you are forced to purchase commercial ebooks from Amazon. You can’t get them from another vendor unless you do something to strip the DRM, and even then you must get titles in Mobipocket format or convert to it. (The Kindle DX supports PDF, but there’s still Amazon’s DRM to contend with. You can read non-DRM protected Mobi content (and PDFs on the DX) sourced from elsewhere, but chances are that it’s freely available in a public domain or Creative Commons licensed edition. If you *buy* it, Amazon gets a cut.

Lack of a standard format is a limiting factor in ebooks. I read them on a Palm OS PDA. I *can* read just about anything – Mobipocket, PDF, Word, RTF, eReader, HTML, plain text…but I need to maintain half a dozen different viewer applications to do it, and remember which book is in which format read with which viewer. (The device doesn’t do ePub, but I have software that can convert it to something the device does do.)

Ultimately, I want to get electronic content *once*, and read it on whatever I have at hand. So I want a standard format everyone supports, and oppose things that get in the way like DRM.
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Dennis

The recent battle between Macmillan, Hachette, and Simon and Schuster vs Amazon over Kindle edition pricing wasn’t about preserving the primacy of the hardcover edition. It was about preserving the hardcover *bestseller*.

*Margins* on hardcovers are highest, and hardcover bestsellers are significant sources of revenue and profit. The publishers decided that *simultaneous* ebook release at a $9.99 price point were cutting into the hardcover sales. Many consumers simply wanted to read the book, and were perfectly happy to get it as an ebook at one half to one third of the hardcover price, with correspondingly lower margins for the publisher.

(It’s a little like pirate downloads of musing in MP3 format. The ones that got hurt by it were the double-platinum stadium acts everyone wanted to hear. They new or mid-lever band might be secretly delighted by the exposure, as more people would hear their music, come to their shows, and possibly buy future releases.)

Mass market paperback editions are released a year after the hardcover precisely to avoid competing with the hardcover release, and I think we can expect to see ebooks follow a similar pattern.

Meanwhile, quality of electronic editions is an issue. Amazon is a worst offender. Every title they stock in paper only has an “I’d like to read this book in a Kindle edition” button. If enough folks click the button for a title, what happens? Chances are there *isn’t* an electronic source file to work from. So a physical book is sent to an offshore contractor in India who scans the paper copy and runs OCR on the scan. The results are packaged and sold as a Kindle edition. As far as I know, copy editing and proofreading to fix the inevitable errors OCR makes is *not* done, and the results are what you might expect.

I’ve seen the occasional horror story in titles from other sources that *had* an electronic edition to start with. I have cautious hopes technology may assist. Right now, the publisher’s all use Adobe InDesign to do typesetting and markup. The output from InDesign is a PDF files that goes to the printer to be fed to an image setter to make plates. InDesign can also output ePub, which is pushing to be an industry standard, but does so poorly. Adobe is aware it’s a concern and future releases should improve in that area.

But I think quality control issues extend beyond ebooks. One old friend was VP at an editorial production house that provided copyeditng and typesetting services to publishers. She described the increasing number of cases where it wasn’t being done on a mailing list we were both on. Another member of the list was an editor at a major publisher, who said “But that’s part of the standard budget of the book, and is always done!” “Maybe in *yuor* house”, was the reply, “but I’m the one in my company who gets to talk to the customers who used to pay us to do that and have decided it’s not necessary.”
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Dennis

Interesting to me is the results of a recent publisher’s experiment. If the student has a choice between buying the ebook only or a combination of eBook and pBook at a very reasonable price, most students buy the combination. They want the pBook for those times when they don’t have Internet access – apparently, there are still times when their connections are bad or they don’t have their mobile devices. And the want the eBooks for the times when they leave their pBook at home.