Thinking about ebooks the way we think about console games and mobile apps

Maybe I haven’t thought this through but amidst all this kerfuffle about proprietary eBook formats, has anyone thought about ebook platforms? Apple has its own format for iBooks, Amazon’s Kindle reads its own format as well, so does Kobo, etc. Yes, there’s the standard ePub format that everyone is supposed to agree on but we know that it may not necessarily serve the commercial interests of each eBook platform provider.

Authors and publishers are pretty much beholden to the whims of platform providers like Apple and Amazon because they rely on these big consumer electronics guys to deliver their work to their readers as far as the digital format is concerned.

Why not think of these as platforms? You know, just like how console game developers have to recreate their games for every console they want to distribute their games on. Just like how mobile application developers have to recode their apps to deliver the best experience on each mobile platform. Just like how software developers have to redo their work for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

The path that delivered us these platforms may have differed from how the ebook formats have come to be but what we have now is pretty much the same situation. Consider the standard ePub format as the web app of ebooks, able to be read anywhere on any platform but has yet to deliver the richer experience that “native” formats are able to.

Just a thought.

5 Notes/ Hide

  1. yonan32 said: It’s different because it’s about adapting an existing content into new platforms, instead of having the platform first then develop contents on top of it like on consoles and mobiles. And the existing nature of the content is platform-independent.
  2. aulia-m posted this