Should Amazon Drop Its Proprietary Format?

In the last few months, there has been a lot of discussion about the reasons Amazon has used a proprietary document format for Amazon Kindle. A lot of customers are complaining about not being able to find their favorite books in the Kindle store. Some folks want to have access to ebooks provided by their libraries but they can’t due to their incompatibility with the device.

I personally have not had much trouble finding English books for my Kindle. The problem I have, as a foreigner, is finding books in my mother language. In fact, I am not sure if Amazon will ever provide support for my kind of books. Don’t get me wrong. There will be English books which won’t be available in PDF and can’t be found on Amazon either. But with 210,000 titles already available on Amazon and many others available in PDF, there are many options to choose from.

Do I want to see an open doc format on Kindle in the future? Absolutely. But Amazon has its reasons. Amazon has spend a lot of time and money developing the device and selling books is a big part of its business. You can’t expect them to allow folks to easily share their Kindle books with friends and family members, can you?

What’s your take: is Amazon’s propriety ebook format a deal breaker?