A Graphic Example

A lot of non-technical people’s eyes glaze over when you start talking
about standard, non-proprietary formats. Mike
Cane has come up with a graphic example of why you don’t
want one company owning the format of the books you read.

Apparently Sony requires any book sold for their reader in
their store to be formatted by them (at a cost of $200). And then
when they do it, it looks like that.

This hideous example is from Sony, for the Sony readers, but
the principle is the same for any proprietary format — if they
won’t tell you how to do it, you’re stuck with them doing it for
you, and you may well not like what they do.

This is why I don’t put music in proprietary formats on SerpentPublications.org.