Amazon, home of the forthcoming Kindle reader, will ideally embrace the IDPF standards efforts, about which some good news came yesterday.
But meanwhile it’s casting a wide net to pick up as many books as possible for its proprietary Mobipocket format—yes, the same one associated with the recent DRM-related server outage. Pages touting books on Amazon carry the following notice:
“Are you the publisher or author? Learn how Amazon can help you make this book an eBook.
“If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can make it available as an eBook on Amazon.com. Learn more.”
Good news and some gotchas to watch out for
The good news is once Amazon has the books in digital format, it can always convert them over to the IDPF standard, and that Mobi’s reader will apparently be able to read the IDPF’s .epub.
But all this doesn’t necessarily mean that that Amazon/Mobi will definitely switch over to the IDPF format within the giant site itself (let’s hope that IDPF executive director Nick Bogaty’s optimism is on the mark).
Oh, and then there’s the nasty DRM question. If proprietary DRM from Mobi and other companies remains common, the Tower of eBabel will still be very much alive at the consumer level.
Sharing Grisham with 20,000 P2P buddies: Nicer precaution against his
A solution, of course, is either no DRM or social DRM, which actually isn’t DRM but the inclusion of your name and other identifying information in a book, so you’re less tempted to share John Grisham with 20,000 of your good friends via P2P. No perfect answer exists here, but social DRM is much better than the eBabel blight that traditional DRM gives us.
The idea of social DRM came from none other than Adobe’s Bill McCoy, a member of the IDPF board, who saw it on the Pragmatic Programmers site, which has been very successful at making money off e-books. I hope that Bill follows through both within Adobe and the IDPF, and that pressure builds on vendors such as Amazon not to let DRM prop up the eBabel Tower. Offering an epub1 logo for tech companies and publishers wanting to offer a DRMless alternative would be a healthy first step; an epub2 logo could follow. But let’s not allow the DRM issue to delay a logo.
Until something concrete happens—and, yes, I’m pessimistic about the IDPF reaching an agreement soon on interoperable traditional DRM, if publishers insist on it—this-here eBabel issue is a long way from being settled at the consumer level.
(Trolling mention found via MobileRead.)
