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Comment by Tloewald | Hacker News Reader

AAC is not a proprietary format ("iTunes media files" — it is to MP4 what MP3 is to MPEG). Other media players can and do support AAC if it has no DRM.

Amazon not only uses DRM but it uses a non-standard ebook format and its hardware does not support vanilla ePub (out of the box, you can download third party viewers to the Fire devices).

To go back to a comparison to Apple: iPods do play WAV and MP3 out of the box, and so does iTunes. The only non-standard media format Apple pushed (Apple lossless) it has mad free and open. Apple's book reader supports ePub out of the box. (Apple does push its own enhancements to ePub for interactive textbooks, but it has done these in the "correct" way.)

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> AAC is not a proprietary format ("iTunes media files" — it is to MP4 what MP3 is to MPEG). Other media players can and do support AAC if it has no DRM.

Both AAC & MP3 are patent encumbered and require licenses for implementation.

You are of course correct, but (a) that's not what the GP was implying since most non iTunes music players and all significant non-iTunes stores support MP3, (b) it doesn't matter to most users, and (c) Ogg Vorbis is only unencumbered to the extent that is too insignificant to represent a useful lawsuit target.

As for (c), AOL did legal research before publishing the Vorbis decoder for WinAmp, and Microsoft used Vorbis for various game titles (I'd guess they also did some legal research).

Of course, anyone can sue over anything, and keep you engaged in court for a long time, even without a good reason. MP3licensing (or MPEG-LA for the newer stuff) doesn't indemnify licensees, as can be seen every year when Sisvel lets German customs confiscate media players on Cebit over MP3 patents not part of the pool.

Note: not ragging on AAC, I think it's a very nice format, but it still is the primary iTunes media format and whilst many others do support it its got a lower level of support than mp3 across the board, but I can see how what I wrote might seem like I'm implying vendor lock in. For all the stick Apple gets about walled gardens they're surprisingly open on many other fronts.

Amazon not only uses DRM but it uses a non-standard ebook format and its hardware does not support vanilla ePub (out of the box, you can download third party viewers to the Fire devices

Amazon uses the MobiPocket format, which was the standard eBook format before ebooks became popular. The Topaz and Azul formats are only used for books which are converted by publishers to ebook by scanning them and OCR'ing the text. These formats appear to be based on the PDF format but the DRM mechanism is non-standard.

Amazon Kindle hardware does support ePub. The software does not. That is a major difference--if the hardware did nto support ePub, it would not be meaningfully possible to add support in via hardware.

Define "standard eBook format". Because, AFAIK, MobiPocket was never standardized. It may have been the popular eBook format, but that's not the same thing as standard.

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