Kindle and Libraries
You can’t read ebooks from your library on a Kindle:
This simple statement may well conceal a growing problem for Amazon in relation to the future sales of their Kindle ereaders.
Whilst the Kindle ereader is currently the world’s best selling ereader, is a superb piece of equipment, well made, easy to use (seriously easy to use), reasonably priced and generally a device that one would recommend without any hesitation to anyone wanting a good, dedicated ereader, it does suffer from a problem that the people at Amazon had never considered when they decided to use their own propriety ebook format with the Kindle, and this is the exponential growth of public libraries all over the developed world, who now offer their members ebooks as well as paper books.
But the wrong ebook format…..
The problem being, the format that libraries all over the world use for the ebooks they offer is the effective industry standard, ePub. And Kindle ereaders can’t work with ePub formatted ebooks. Thus Kindle owners are excluded from this source of ebooks to read. But Kindle has native support for PDF file, if your PDF ebook is drm proetced, you need to remove the protection first with pdf drm removal before you can read it on your kindle device.
So, what happens next?
I am curious to see if in future versions of the Kindle, Amazon will broaden the range of ebook formats it can handle, or even go as far as to drop their own ebook format and simply go with the rest of the world and accept ePub as the format of choice for ebooks.
I am reasonably sure that if they stick to their guns, and refuse to make the Kindle work with ePub, their sales will surely suffer from this one unexpected development – the ebook lending libraries.
Of course, the other possibility (there are always other possibilities after all) is that libraries will change and start to stock their ebooks in the Amazon format as well as ePub. For Amazon, this would obviously be the best outcome, and one I am sure they are beavering away in the back rooms trying to bring about.
In any event, I hope that a sensible solution is found, since the Kindle is one of the best ereaders out there, and I can understand that people would like to buy it… But if that choice closes a wonderful source of ebooks, then I can only see sales dropping in time, as other brands of ereader who do support ePub take the lead.
More drm removal tools for ebook reader:Nook drm removal Kobo drm removal
Top eBook Reading Formats
The most important ebook format are always the ones that work on the device or devices you own but if you have a choice the most important ones are the ones that have the most eBook dealers or most eBooks available. Today these formats include AZW Amazon, MOBI MobiPocket, PNPd Palm eReader, and ePub. Another very popular format is PDF from Adobe. However, it does not tend to work as well on portable mobile devices due to the screen size. It is more suited to computers since it often expects full paper size pages
AZW which is the same as MOBI but the DRM is different. You often see TXT with TXT no formatting and HTML with eBook readers often ignores any complicated formatting. More general purpose portable devices will have loadable applications for other formats.
ePub is an open format defined by the Open eBook Forum of the International Digital Publishing Forum. It is based on XHTML and XML along with optional CSS style sheets. Its predecessor was the OEB standard. Specifications are found at the IDPF web site. Some epub files have drm protection on eBook if you need to remove drm from epub first before reading.
MOBI
is the format used by the MobiPocket Reader. It may have a .mobi
extension or it may have a .prc extension. The extension can be changed
by the user to either of the accepted forms. In either case it may be
DRM protected or non-DRM. The .prc extension is used because the PalmOS
doesn't support any file extensions except .prc or .pdb. Note that
Mobipocket prohibits their DRM format to be used on dedicated eBook
readers that support other DRM formats
PDF - Portable Document Format created by Adobe for their Acrobat products. It is the defacto standard for document interchange. Software support exists for almost every computer platform and handheld device. Some devices have problems with PDF since most content available is scaled for either A4 or letter format, both of which are not easily readable when reduced to fit on small screens. Some Readers can reflow some PDF documents, including the Sony PRS505, to accommodate the small screen. Some eBook readers, including the iRex iLiad, have a pan-and-zoom feature that aids readability, but extracts a price in ergonomics. Some PDF files have drm protection on eBook if you need to remove drm from pdf first with pdf drm removal before reading.