RicDay on Publishing

The weekend got interesting when a message appeared on Twitter that Amazon’s Kindlegen conversion tool is now putting an entire copy of the uploaded EPUB into the mobipocket .prc file.

Naturally, debate quickly erupted around the question of just what this means. The popular suggestion seemed to be that Amazon might be planning to drop its own format in favor of the EPUB format.

I don’t think so. What follows is my personal speculation.

Winning Everything

If there is one thing we know about Amazon, it is that the company wants to dominate the selling of books in all forms. So let’s look at where Amazon stands today:

• The Amazon websites are already the largest vendors of print books
• Amazon has a larger list of commercial ebooks for purchase than does any of its competitors
• Kindle is the best-selling e-ink reader
• Kindle Reader software is available on various platforms including the iPad and iPhone (and probably sells more books than iBooks does), Android, and Blackberry
• Kindle Reader software is also available for desktop reading on Windows and Macintosh PCs

So is Amazon in any way threatened in its quest for dominance? I think the answer to that is, yes it is.

The Threat in the Cloud

The Kindle universe involves downloading a copy of the book to the reading device. Sometime in the next few months, Google will be launching its cloud-based Google Editions ebook store.

Google Editions is likely to be, overnight, the second-largest venue for purchasing commercial ebooks. Where Kindle allows you to read the first chapter before you decide to buy, Google Editions will allow the user to evaluate a book in a variety of ways, using Google’s search technology.

Google Editions is also partnering with booksellers (the people Amazon would like to drive out of business), allowing them to sell ebooks through their webstores.

If I were in Amazon’s shoes, I would be thinking long and hard about how I might want to counter the competition from Google. I would probably want to also offer a cloud-based shopping option. And it would not be too hard to offer an EPUB reader for the Kindle platform.

But where I would focus most of my effort would be in things that would differentiate my offerings from those of Google. I would enhance the AZW format by:

• Building into my reader software a way for customers to engage other customers in discussions about the books they are reading. Where readers of Amazon print books can log into the Amazon website and post their reviews, imagine readers of Kindle ebooks being able to add their reviews and commentary from within each book.
• Allow readers to add comments within a book about passages in that book and selectively decide who if anyone can see those comments
• Encourage transmedia books for the AZW format (serving mixed media files on demand from the cloud is preferable to having huge downloads clogging the pipes of Whispernet)
• Introduce color games in the cloud. Sure, the Kindle itself is monochrome, but that should not be an obstacle to it calling a regular web browser, authenticating the connection in the background against the Kindle account, and giving the user access to single- and multi-player games in Amazon's cloud (this would help explain Amazon's recent hiring of Andre Vrignaud, previously Microsoft’s Director of Game Platform Strategy)
• Launch a touchpad, color Kindle
• Pursue the traditional media (newspapers and magazines) even more aggressively to get them on board. Those media want a paywall for their content; I’m sure Amazon would be delighted to provide it.

A New Version of AZW

All of the above would require a major overhaul of the AZW format. In effect, a new format. The EPUB group is working towards a new format incorporating html5 goodness, but like any committee-driven standard the new version of EPUB will not be official until sometime in 2012.

Amazon is not restricted by committee decisions. Launching a new version of AZW with some of the features I speculate about above could be just months away. Timing it to coincide with the launch of the Google Editions bookstore could be a useful way to muddy the waters around Google’s launch. At minimum it would divide media attention between the two.

Back to EPUB in PRC

So where does the EPUB-in-the-PRC file fit in? Perhaps Amazon will be saying to consumers, we'll support the inferior EPUB format for those of you who don't yet have the goodness of our new AZW reader and software ... and then serve the EPUB version from the cloud? If nothing else, it would cast EPUB as the format for the "have not" ereader population, and help position the Kindle software and hardware as being the shiny castle on top of the hill (big, deep, propietary moat and all).

What do you think? Should I lay off those Thai peppers in my curry?