O’Reilly says – Amazon must open the Kindle
Daylife/Reuters Pictures
O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly makes a provocative claim relative to Amazon’s successful e-book reader, the Kindle: embrace open e-book standards, or be run over by them.
It’s a bold prediction, considering what Apple has demonstrated with the iPhone. It may also be wrong.
O’Reilly writes: (Apple) seems to have a knack for balancing the benefits of both open and closed architectures that Amazon has yet to discover. While Apple maintains tight control over what goes into the App Store, there’s a loophole big enough to drive a truck through: Any Web page can act as an application for the iPhone.
O’Reilly then explains that the Kindle doesn’t provide this same loophole (i.e., allowing open-formatted e-books to be read on the Kindle in the same way that the iPhone enables Web applications to run on the iPhone, and in which the iPod encouraged MP3s and other free formats to flourish on the iPod).
I don’t think I agree. On my Kindle, I read a variety of books that I downloaded for free from Project Gutenberg, and I suspect that this will only increase as more and more free content is formatted for the Kindle.
Open allows experimentation. Open encourages competition. Open wins.
“Open wins?” Baloney! Open wins in the small and parochial world of the hobbyist.
Every year I hear about Open this or that getting ready to rule the world. Real soon now – as a certain sage would say. In practice, if you disallow an opportunity for market forces to interact you end up with the [late] Soviet Union instead of China.
Comparison in the article based on Sony and Apple are patently absurd. Apple knows how to sell good stuff. Sony doesn’t know how to sell anything.
