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

[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.