Why No PDF on Amazon’s eBook Reader?

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There’s a tremendous amount of hoopla today around the Kindle, Amazon’s new eBook reader. Most of the buzz is that it’s a solid device with a couple of killer features that could turn it into the winner. The biggest is the internet access. Being able to connect to the internet to download books and content is a big deal. As someone who is a huge fan of books and with a wife who has filled our bookshelves full of every kind of book, the device looks very interesting. She’s sleeping as I write this, but I’m planning on showing the device to her when she wakes up and I have very little doubt this could be her “iPhone”.

Now that I work for Adobe I’ve been trying some of the various eBook reader technologies out on her. Adobe has always had a stake in the ePaper world and things like Digital Editions show that we’re trying, from a software angle, to innovate around eBooks. That’s where my reservations about the device lie. With so much PDF content out there, why isn’t PDF going to be supported as a device format? Worse, they aren’t going to be supporting IDF’s EPUB standard for eBooks.

Amazon sees an opportunity to be the center of the eBook world from a sellers standpoint, but it’s a shame that the digital investments of other bookstores, libraries and educational institutions are all going to be shut out by the Kindle. Hopefully this is just a matter of this being version 1.0 of the device. Down the road I would think market pressures and customer demand will help nudge Amazon to open the device a bit more. I’m excited about the resurgence in books but I’d also like them on more of my own terms.

[tags]PDF, Kindle, Amazon[/tags]

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  • http://blog.danmcweeney.com dan mcweeney

    Already some complaints, this from someone who is on the legal side and closely related to the OSF.
    http://tieguy.org/blog/2007/11/19/kindle/

  • http://www.riapedia.com/ Mike Potter

    The Amazon product page doesn’t specify PDF, but the Engadget review says that it supports it.

    So, probably it was either in there and then pulled or it is in there, and just not on the product page.

    Mike

  • http://tieguy.org/blog Luis

    Looks like they want formats that will allow them to do incremental reflow. Can’t completely blame them.

  • http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu Kendall Whitehouse

    Luis wrote:

    Looks like they want formats that will allow them to do incremental reflow.

    This doesn’t entirely rule out PDF, since a tagged PDF can reflow.

    :Kendall

  • http://www.ebook3000.com jay

    The Amazon product page doesn’t specify PDF, but the Engadget review says that it supports it.

  • http://www.funsciencewithyourcomputer.org Christophe Cornu

    Yes, a very good question, Tyan!

    A book well preserved can be read for dozens of years. If every ebook device tries to force in their own specific format what are the chances the reader will be able to access the content twenty years from now? And we are not even talking about DRMs here. This industry has yet to mature. Maybe the solution will come from Google Books after they build up a critical mass of digital content. PDF offers many advantages from the point of view of the publishers. Readers are more stable than HTML web browsers so the following document extracted from my eBook is rendered as expected on different platforms – something HTML / CSS does not do quite as well at this time.

    http://www.funsciencewithyourcomputer.org/chrix_funsciencewithyourcomputer_free_sample.pdf

    For now it is exciting to see the growth of eBooks and eInk technology – and frustrating to observe the multiplication of eBooks ‘standards’. What format will be for books what MP3 is to music and MPEG2/4 to video? PDF has many technical qualities but does its license cause trouble? Who controls its format? Do Adobe readers get bigger and bigger with every new version? Some users haven’t upgraded since the excellent version 5 for that reason. PNG was created to counter the threat of patent wars around GIF. Others will promote html/css and Amazon variants, MSFT Word doc/docx… Which eBook format will be most practical and transparent over time? What if eBooks want to embed videos and sounds as well? Why not :-) ?

  • Amitabh Saikia

    I have lot of ebooks and e-papers that I paid for, which are in PDF or .PS format. It was bit disappointing that Kindle does not support PDF.

    Assuming the digital papers readers are evolving and already two big players(Sony and Amazon) in the market, I am hopeful. I can wait for some more time, before I could lay my hand on a device which is this expensive and doesn’t support most popular formats.

    I would definitely score Kindle higher than Sony’s reader as it has wireless connectivity, features like bookmarks and dictionary. However, Kindle needs to evolve more, before I am ready to pay the price.

  • Robert Morris

    I was disappointed as well that Kindle doesnt support pdf documents. As an educator and researcher most of my documents that I need to read “on the run” are in this format or can be easily converted to it. No pdf, I will not buy it but would have if it had this capability.