Writer and game designer Guido Henkel has weighed in on Amazon’s recent announcement of the KF8 format, which brings HTML5 to the Kindle. He makes the very salient point that, while it promises to move the platform forward, there’s a devil in the fine print. His concern? Platform fragmentation. As he rightly points out, the Kindle line now includes three sets of incompatible capabilities. The idea of “write once, run anywhere,” the catchy slogan Sun Microsystems coined to sell Java, deteriorates into that familiar rejoinder, “write once, debug everywhere.”
This is, unfortunately, the nature of the beast. As Andy Rubin, Google’s VP of Engineering, notes in The Guardian about a recent attempt to bring sanity to the mobile space: “There is always a dream that you could write [a program] once and [have it] run anywhere and history has proven that that dream has not been fully realised and I am sceptical that it ever will be.”
That doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be some push-back. Vocal and persistent push-back. And if anyone knows about fragmentation, it should be Andy Rubin, Google’s Android guru. The Android platform is seriously fragmented. It’s so bad at the moment that developers actually have to decide which Android version (and hardware platform) to write for.
At the same time, it is clear to me that Amazon’s push for KF8 is a much-needed move toward HTML5, in support of the Kindle Fire. I would have preferred they adopt the ePub format, but I suspect Amazon doesn’t want to cut the MOBI cord entirely. The promise of backward compatibility is always tempting, especially when some of your developers (and PMs) were schooled at Microsoft.
So am I panicking yet? Well, I’m trying to keep things in perspective.
The hardest job, in my estimation, isn’t converting a work to the eBook format. The hardest job is writing the work in the first place. As I’ve said here a number of times, what I really want are BETTER TOOLS for that last mile, where conversion takes place. I was an early fan of Push Pop Press (gone). I think Adobe’s InDesign has great potential here. InDesign isn’t perfect, but Adobe has stepped up to the plate and released an ePub plug-in; Amazon has added its own Kindle plug-in to the mix. Good first steps.
Yes, it urinates me to have to create, I dunno, three or four versions of everything. I care what my work looks like. I tweak the code to improve the result. I loathe the idea of turning it over to Smashwords or Smashmouth or whatever the hell it’s called. So please, Amazon (and Apple, for that matter), don’t let this get out of hand. Next time you have a big idea about moving the eBook format forward, call Andy Rubin. No, wait. Don’t.
1 thought on “The eBook Fragmentation Toolset”