5 Top Publishers Plan Rival to Kindle Format, Ignore Existence of PDF
Five of the nation's largest publishers of newspapers and magazines are teaming up to challenge Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle electronic-book reader with their own technology that would display in color and work on a variety of devices.
- Ryan Nakashima, The Washington Post.
As I’m sure you all know by now; I am a coder above all else. With this one piece of data, you should know there are two things I despise in this entire world:
- Flash and
Why? Because they’re closed off, proprietary, and quite frankly a bitch to deal with on computers. However, that doesn’t stop me from advocating their use for WHAT THEIR ACTUAL PURPOSE is (or, in the case of flash – should be).
So, it should come as only a slight surprise that I’m incredibly agitated over these new formats. You’re creating “book” file formats that will “display in color” and “work on a variety of devices.” Huh, isn’t there already a format specifically for publications, made to work on any multitude of devices? Let’s see, oh, right Portable Document Format – A file format made SPECIFICALLY to render the same way on any device.
Kudos, Publishers – You’ve just re-invented the wheel.