Amazon to support Epub?

[cavocorax]

I don't know if this is just an unverified rumour, or if there's fact behind it, but the folks at ereader.com have posted that Amazon will soon support the ePub format.  As a new Kindle owner  I'm pretty excited by this. I'm hoping this will make it easier to get even more books on the Amazon store, and it should make it easier for me to buy books from other retailers without having to run it through Calibre first. And obviously this will be great for everyone else as it'll open the market up further for competition (you know what book you want: do you buy it from B&N, Amazon, Kobo, etc?).

I wonder if this is how they were planning to add library support?

I really hope this is true as I think it would simplify the whole industry. We'd have a lot less "what books will my device support" if epub truly becomes the industry standard.


(Also - hello! This is my first time posting here!

I'm a 29year old Canadian female who loves ebooks, and reading digitally. I've been following ebooks news for a few years now and I thought I was in heaven when I got my Sony Reader about a year and a half ago.  Now that I've got the shiny new Kindle I'm absolutely delighted by the additional features it provides: highlighting, note-taking, dictionary, collections that you can change on the Kindle itself instead of on your computer. I'm not knocking Sony though - if I had upgraded to a newer Sony reader I'd have the same features and my last reader was absolutely solid, but it was the gift card for Amazon.com that made my decision for me.

I read a bit from all types of genres, but generally favor sci-fi/fantasy, and avoid romance/westerns).

Comments

[elf]

Mobileread has a great deal of speculation about whether they'll allow Adobe's DRM, or make up something of their own.

If they use Adobe's DRM, people will be able to buy ebook from other stores for their Kindles. (Technically, they can already buy books from non-DRM stores, but you can do that for any device.) That would mean Amazon probably selling more Kindles, but not being able to lock customers into their store--OTOH, lack of library ebook support has been one of the big complaints recently, so maybe that's worth losing the monopoly.

I don't think it'd bring more ebooks to Amazon (they already take submissions as ePub and run them through a converter for the mobi format); it might allow Kindle users to buy ebooks elsewhere.

If they use their own DRM, customers could get ePubs from the growing number of stores & free sources that only provide PDF and ePub, and they'd keep the DRM purchases locked into Amazon.

I don't know if (when?) they'll issue a firmware upgrade--or if this is a sneaky way to say "First-edition Kindle users won't be able to install this upgrade and will have to buy a new device to get access to the new features." I think they changed wireless providers at some point; this might be a way to phase out the units on the older plan.

(you know what book you want: do you buy it from B&N, Amazon, Kobo, etc?)

Heh. I don't buy from any of those; I refuse to deal with DRM or special apps to buy books. Still, I get to deal with "do I buy from the publisher site, from AllRomanceEbooks where I collect points towards free books, or Fictionwise, where I get all the formats I want but the customer service has plummeted in the last two years?"

[cavocorax]

I hope they use Adobe's DRM, just to keep things simple. As well, I think that would mean Canadians would have access to library lending as we already do through Adobe, so that'd be a big win for me.

I know Amazon is probably nervous about losing their monopoly, but I don't know that it would be that bad. The Kindle is built to make it easy to shop at the Amazon store so I'm sure many people will do that and never bother with manually transferring files over from other places. And not everyone is aware you can buy from other stores: I've talked to a few Nook owners who didn't know they didn't have to shop at B&N only . If Amazon opens things up, and the prices are good, I can see people (who do know you can shop around) with other readers buying from Amazon that couldn't before. I just hope these walls come down...

I'd like to avoid DRM if I could. Do you know of any sites that publish mainstream books without the DRM? Or do you mostly deal with Romance? I've got Calibre set up to strip the DRM off of any books I buy anyways, but it would still be nice if I didn't have to do that in the first place. By buying DRM books I'm just telling everyone that I don't mind, even though the only reason I buy them is because I know I can(quite easily) remove it .

[elf]

Baen is the first place everyone mentions; they've been publishing DRM-free ebooks for over 10 years, and have a large free library of ebooks, including a lot of first-in-series works. Baen's ebooks are $6 each (some older ones are as low as $4) and offered in multiple formats.

Fictionwise has a large selection of multiformat ebooks; those are all without DRM. Backlist Ebooks is a collection of authors who have reclaimed their rights & are releasing their own backlists; it skews heavy toward romance and mystery. Links to several more non-DRM ebook stores; while the romance/erotica genres are pretty much king of the ebook world (queen of the ebook world?), there's also several science fiction publishers and a few nonfic publishers.

Some of Amazon's ebooks are sold without DRM; the way to check on the book's listing is the device limit--if it's "unlimited," there's no DRM.

[cavocorax]

Thanks! That's a great link - I'll have to save it.

[liv]

If Amazon supported epub I would very likely buy a Kindle. The lack of epub support is pretty much the one reason why I didn't go for a Kindle in the first place; they have better features for less money than pretty much anything else on the market. I would start buying ebooks from Amazon at a last resort if I couldn't find them from my preferred retailers; unfortunately that's quite often the case because Amazon has a better selection than pretty much anyone else.

However it seems to me like this breaks Amazon's business model, which is to sell Kindles at a loss so that people get into the habit of buying ebooks from Amazon directly from their devices. If it were easy to get free content for Kindles, or get books from other retailers without jumping through extra hoops, where's Amazon's market advantage? I suspect that they'll support epub like they "support" mobi: with their own proprietary DRM so that you're still completely locked in to Amazon. So they won't be getting my extra several hundred dollars per year after all.

[cavocorax]

I'm also curious about what this would to do Amazon's business model, but due to access to the Amazon store being built into the Kindle I can see that a lot of customers would just buy from there because of convenience. The ability to browse the online store and send to the Kindle directly makes shopping (too) easy. Any books you get from other places have to be transferred over through USB (as far as I know), so that extra step may stop some people.

I was a bit daunted by the lack of ePub when I first started shopping for an eReader. I actually bought the Sony PRS300 a year and a half ago because I didn't like the idea of being locked into Amazonworld. Once I got going though I realised that with Calibre I can convert one file type to another with relative ease, and now that I have the Kindle, I've set it up so that as soon as I add a book to Calibre, it will strip the DRM off for me. Now that I've got this figured out I feel comfortable shopping at whoever has the best prices. I see a lot of people that refuse to shop at places with DRM but I have a hard time with that because I read a lot of mainstream fiction, and don't know where to find it otherwise (some publishers still put DRM on too).

I'm probably just dreaming but it would be nice if Amazon realised they would have the market advantage due to the size of their store if they would just make it easy for everyone to shop there (and not just Kindle owners).