Amazon nixes pdf and Microsoft formats from ebook offerings

Online retailing giant Amazon.com will stop selling ebooks in PDF and Microsoft Reader formats, according to this article from Publishers Weekly. This means that all ebooks sold by Amazon will be either in its proprietary Kindle format, or the Mobipocket format.

Amazon.com has notified its publisher and author clients that it plans to cease offering e-books in the Microsoft Reader and Adobe e-book formats. In the future, the online retailer says it plans to offer only e-books in the Kindle format (for wireless download to its Kindle reading device) and the Mobipocket format, both of which are owned by Amazon.

Since Amazon owns both the Kindle and Mobipocket formats, this might be a move to reign in ebooks as the format wars heat up. Another side to this story, as reported here at the Teleread blog, is that a lot of technical books come in PDF format (something PDF is well suited for), which could pose a problem for the retailer.

Personally, I see this as a move by Amazon to try and control the ebook market by peddling the two formats they own. Will it work? Only time will tell. If the ebook-reading public starts to prefer another format (think: epub) over anything else, then Amazon might find itself in real trouble down the road.

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