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eBook Industry Opinion
The ebook business is the Wild West as of this writing date. It is a wide-open field that is filled with players jockeying for all types of positions.
What is interesting about the ebook industry right now is the similarities to where the PC and Operating Systems business was in the mid-1980's. Everyone is opting for his or her "standard" format and interfaces to become the real standard that everyone else will adopt.
Our prediction: it will never happen!
Unlike the PC and OS wars of the 1980's, there will never become a widespread standard for ebook formats, tools or any other ancillary category of vendor "opportunity".
Except within the large New York Publishing firms.
That's where a big game is on. The players in that game include Microsoft, Adobe and Overdrive on the software, tools and vendor side.
In the publishing arena, you have Random House, AOL Time Warner Book Group, Harcourt Worldwide STM Group and HarperCollins Publishers.
Here, you will find some info on the Open eBook Forum, a non-profit organization dedicated to trying to arrive at "standards" for electronic publishing.
We applaud the effort, and all the big boys have to play ball there or risk being left behind this massive market shift in electronic publishing, but for our money, its all posturing.
You see, no one is going to dictate to me what we are going to read nor in what format we are going to read it in. They might be able to do that with college and high school students, but not the rest of the free world.
Our standards are established: PDF, .doc, .txt, html, .exe. Period.
This movement, or attempted movement is akin to when IBM tried to tell us that we could only use THEIR 5.25" Floppy drives and diskettes. We know where that went.
In coming issues, we will deal more in depth with the issues and news surrounding the ebook industry in all its many forms and flavors. For now, just know that you have found a place that will give you the truth unbiased by any particular polar aptitude!
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