Open Standards

All of the large corporations spend a lot of time and money telling anyone who will listen that patents are a vital component to innovation. They use it in PR for the education system to indoctrinate kids, the political system to extend IP laws and treaties. Patents in fact are the path to stagnation.

This post is about expanding some thoughts and discussions I've been having on Identi.ca this morning around the epub format and the new Amazon Kindle 3. Calibre does convert a great many formats, it also optionally manages your collection, lets you edit metatags, transfer ebooks to and from your device. Converting epubs to a format the device accepts is no problem. It's about registering a preference for me.

Standards are important, they avoid duplication of effort and increase interactivity between various different devices. Imagine if every TV network broadcast it's own standard of TV signal, so you'd need a different TV for each network, or cars were made with their own standard of petrol so you had to fill up at a petrol station who sold fuel for your brand of car. This is the retarded world of vendor lock-in, it's what happens when companies put their own profits above the needs of their customers.

Since the Amazon Kindle eBook Reader was released I loved the idea of one, I've been waiting for the right product at the right price supporting the right formats before I jumped in. I have no intention of buying a device which only does proprietary formats locked to one vendor or another. I am not going to build a collection of eBooks tied to the manufacturer of my reader, so I've been doing some research. I've found ePub to be initially baffling, but after some initial reading found it to be a brilliant, standards compliant format.

We are all familiar with visiting a website to watch a movie file or listen to an audio track and it telling us we have to install a plugin or codec to play the file. This is a common tactic of malware writers, to trick the unwary user onto clicking on like a video.exe to supposedly install the codecs to play that video file to then wonder why they're now part of a botnet. This is a huge security risk for users and can easily be solved if the codecs are pre-installed on their PC.