Amazon's recent rollout of the new Kindle models impressed me that it was in the ebook business for the long run. Now Amazon has proved the point yet again, stealing a march on the ePub 3 standard by releasing Kindle Format 8, with HTML5 and CSS3 support.

As I mentioned before, ebook feature creep runs the risk confusing the whole point of an ebook device, which is to deliver text to the eyeballs, not to create illuminated texts. However, the new standard is necessary for textbooks, comics, and Asian languages.

This announcement reinforces the reality of the ebook revolution. The purchase of Kobo by Japanese e-commerce giant Rakuten supplies more ammunition. Previously one of the also-rans, this makes Kobo a major player along with Amazon, Apple, B&N, and Sony.

The hope as well is that Japanese publishers will fall in line behind ePub 3 (which supports Unicode and vertical justification), rather than further fracturing the market with more proprietary standards.

Casting a backwards glance at where the word processing world was two decades ago, two standards (that are almost identical under the hood) is not a bad place for the ebook industry to find itself at this stage.

Continuing with that analogy, Amazon is Microsoft and the legacy publishers are WordPerfect for DOS, slow to realize the magnitude of the paradigm shift before them, and overly confident that their customers will forever pay the full retail price for their flagship products.

Alas, as Virginia Postrel points out, there is the little thing called a demand curve.

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Labels: ebooks, economics, kindle