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Is there any reason (e.g., patents) for Amazon not to natively support ePubs or do they just want to make sure there's that extra bit of friction in using anyth
by jzb 3y ago
Is there any reason (e.g., patents) for Amazon not to natively support ePubs or do they just want to make sure there's that extra bit of friction in using anything not from their store? (While claiming "support" for ePubs -- just with extra steps.)
- SSLy 3y agoThe latter, ePubs are dumb HTML+CSS+fonts containted in a zip.
- __mharrison__ 3y agoThe general mechanism for making Kindle books in the past (on the Amazon KDP website) was to run a tool (kindlegen) that would convert EPUBs to Kindle files. Amazon could have native support for EPUB from day 1 if they wanted to.
- kemayo 3y agoBased on the rate of changes to the software for Kindles, I have to assume that their Kindle dev team is one or two people working on it in their spare time, so maybe it's lumped under the heading of "legacy format issues, we'll get to it someday". (Cynically: yes, it's probably the anti-competitive friction reason.)