Damn, .Epub Doesn’t Even Rate When You’re FUDding Kindle

Posted on March 9, 2008 by dmoynihan

So this dude, at Computerworld, is offering up a chunk of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about Kindle’s dominance of the ebook market.  It’s a silly and mostly unreadable post, though the digg comments amuse, but nowhere, despite the author’s clear intent to trash Kindle on no evidence, does he mention Kindle’s lack of direct support for .Epub as a reason for the device’s “failure.”

It’s possible that the writer understands that Kindle, in its support of Mobipocket and OPS 2.0, does follow real ebook standards, but more likely that no one actually cares about Adobe’s silly agenda anymore, if they ever did.

The hypothetical format doesn’t even make phantom critiques anymore.  Weakest astroturfing campaign in history.

About dmoynihan

Me here.
This entry was posted in Devices, Odd and tagged , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.
  • mat

    Ehm, you should really check the ePub format:
    Metadata, toc and all the MSReader features improved, quite easy to understand
    and to create, quite good to use.

    Till now you can check through:
    Firefox Openberg plugin (no toc feature)
    FBReader (no toc feature)
    Adobe Digital Editions
    KDE okular 4.1_beta (not in 4.0)

    And the list is still growing, guess why!!!!!

  • http://www.munseys.com dmoynihan

    As for checking it out, I’ve got an automated sample two posts from the top. I can make 25,000 of them tomorrow modifying my existing Plucker batch scripts. I just don’t care.

    I’m sorry, the only popularity .epub has ever had as an end-user format is from folks with no commercial interests (Noring, Rothman, you) who, lacking lives of their own, enjoy telling others how to do things, and of course from Adobe, a company that wants to mandate its adoption in schools and wherever else regulations capture so they can drop their mark of the beast (Adobe Adept DRM) on under-performing software and make a killing utilizing Stallman’s “Right To Read” as a business model.

    You’ve listed three software applications that DO NOT USE ALL THESE WONDERFUL, RUMORED features. And Adobe. I should care about them because? Firefox, 20 percent of the browser market, great. However, Openberg has 250 downloads a week, and a horrible review.

    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=openberg&cat=all

    Meanwhile DAISY, the only legit part of the whole .epub thing, and the only reason I cared, has quietly been working on second and third sources for the better part of eight months, with the third source resembling NIMAS, our National File Format.

    Yeah, it’s a bandwagon.

    Do you have any idea how many sales records Kindle has broken this month? And the month before? And the month before that?

    I’m sure you’ve got all kinds of bells and whistles and “this-is-so-really-greats-just-down-the-roads” to give me. However Jeff Bezos, a billionaire with his own rocket ship, is on record saying the purpose of a book is to disappear. And he’s got a product that proves it.

    Time to leave the cocoon, pal. The two idiots leading it have flamed out pretty badly.

    /And if .epub had all these wonderful features, folks wouldn’t need to lie about it in blog posts (like Rothman) and mailing lists (like Bogaty), it’d be a market leader by now.