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

&#62; 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<p>Wow... and I was considering getting one for technical books. No thanks.

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.<p>Interesting alternative of the iPod supporting <i>both</i> a closed eco-system and open standards:<p><i>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.</i><p>But, of course, Apple <i>is</i> trying to keep the iPhone closed.<p>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.

"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."<p>Downside - you probably wouldn't have a business right now.<p>Good choice from Tim - I wonder how long he considered it for?

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.