Tim O'Reilly: Why Kindle Should Be An Open Book | Hacker News Reader

Tim O'Reilly: Why Kindle Should Be An Open Book

forbes.com

> Amazon's Kindle file format doesn't provide support for tables or for so-called monospaced fonts, two formatting features that we use heavily in our line of technical books

Wow... and I was considering getting one for technical books. No thanks.

The Kindle's not a good place to get books that rely on formatting. They offer one serif font and they generate paragraphs and line breaks but don't offer any other formatting.

Given that point alone, it's almost a no-brainer than the Kindle needs help.

Just because the open standards won on the web, doesn't mean they will always win. Microsoft won for decades. Often, standards are closed for a period, then opened when users won't pay for further improvements, and a competitor has almost caught up. Adobe did this with postscript fonts.

Interesting alternative of the iPod supporting both a closed eco-system and open standards:

People didn't populate their iPods solely with music purchased from Apple. It was easy for them to "rip" their own CDs into the standard mp3 file format and load their entire music collection onto the device.

But, of course, Apple is trying to keep the iPhone closed.

What's stopping competitors from making an e-ink device to compete with Kindle? The tech is only going to get cheaper. A difference from Apple is that Amazon already has a book store online.

Is the Kindle closedness about ensuring that the hardware experience is good or about ensuring eBook marketplace control?

People call me naive, but I honestly think that Apple's motivation in running the various iStores is to ensure a good experience.

The music store was targeted to ensure that people would be able to buy all their music digitally. The labels required that DRM be on every thing. When Jobs won, he kickdropped the DRM.

Apple isn't required to sign every app that goes on its phones, but keeping rigorous controls has kept the user experience pretty good and, like it or not, it's encouraged an ecosystem to grow because developers can ask for a little money for their work and get paid for it. Also, let's be honest about these apps for a minute. You're not gonna run that shit in an emulator on your Googlephone. There is no iPhone clone. And when your iPhone dies and you get a new one, you just sync it all back up again.

To be fair, I didn't think it was a good idea when Steve-o said there weren't going to be native apps on the iPhone, but I don't know how much of that was some sort of weird business decision and how much of it was because they had no idea when the SDK was going to be ready.

It's the balance between practical freedom and idealistic freedom. The Kindle trods upon a lot of practical freedoms at the cost of little in the way of an enhanced experience.

I'd bet that they have publishers complaining about their stuff being available as an easily-copied file online. Book publishers are quieter than the RIAA, but they've got very strict ideas about what's good and what's not. I would bet they're the ones who want DRM.

Outside of the Kindle store, you can add books of any ebook format, DRM or no DRM. Most of my Kindle is entirely open. Amazon likes open formats, and they're trying their best to support what they can.

"The offer was simple: Pay Microsoft a $50,000 fee plus a share of any revenue, and in return it would provide this great platform for publishing, with proprietary publishing tools and file formats that would restrict our content to users of the Microsoft platform."

Downside - you probably wouldn't have a business right now.

Good choice from Tim - I wonder how long he considered it for?

I'm afraid the web might come full circle back to something like we started with separate networks and walled off content. The recent buzz about Cable companies wanting to restrict online content to paid customers and the net neutrality flap are examples of this. As belts tighten content owners are getting scared and want to monetize their 'stuff' with more control.

From the little I know about of the Kindle architecture, it would be a simple software update to open it up. Right now, Amazon is making a hefty buck off only supporting its own proprietary standards. I'd imagine that Amazon is a smart enough organization that as soon as the business requirements change, we'll see Kindle supporting PDF, epub, etc., but while there is no market pressure, one can't hold it against Amazon from leeching the market as much as they can.

That's a really old/dated analogy they pull to highlight why the Kindle might fail if it stays closed. It almost doesn't even seem relevant due to how much has changed since the days just before the WWW. I can think of a few more modern closed systems that are doing quite fine.

This is such a tired argument. We all know these things don't really matter to the average consumer. It will be other factors that will determine it's success.

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