A Call for a Unified E-book Market

Introducing an occasional column from the general manager, publisher and a chair of O'Reilly Media's TOC conferences
By Joe Wikert - PW - Feb 03, 2012

Imagine buying a car that locks you into one brand of fuel. That new BMW only runs on BMW gas. There are plenty of BMW gas stations around, so convenience isn't an issue. But if a different brand of gas station offers a discount, a membership program, or some other marketing campaign, you can't participate. You're locked in with the BMW gas stations.

This could never happen in the real world, right? Consumers are too smart to buy into something like this. Or are they? After all, isn't that exactly what's happening in the e-book world? You buy a dedicated e-book reader like a Kindle or a Nook and you're locked in to that company's content. Part of this problem has to do with e-book formats (e.g., EPub or mobi) while another stems from publisher insistence on the use of digital rights management (DRM). Let's look at these issues individually.

Here's Amazon's not-so-secret formula: every time I buy another e-book for my Kindle, I'm building a library that makes me that much more loyal to Amazon's platform. If I've invested hundreds of dollars in Kindle-formatted content, how could I afford to switch to another reading platform?

It would be too inconvenient to have part of my library in Amazon's mobi format and the rest in EPub. Even though I could read both on a tablet, I'd be forced to switch between two different apps. The user interface between any two reading apps is similar but not identical, and searching across your entire library becomes a two-step process since there's no way to access all of your content within one app.

This situation isn't unique to Amazon. The same issue exists for all the other dedicated e-reader hardware platforms (e.g., Kobo, Nook, etc.). Google eBooks initially seemed like a solution to this problem, but it still doesn't offer mobi formats for the Kindle, so it's selling content for every format under the sun—except the one with the largest market share.

Read the full story at PW here.