Note: Chris Meadows also covered this story earlier this week.
Adobe DRM will get some loving attention from me in a post later this week.
Meanwhile guess which topics come up in a Slate piece on Black Friday deals as bait for suckers? Clashing e-book formats and DRM.
I’m very, very pleased to see Slate’s Farhad Manjoo warning Black Friday fans about the hazards of the Tower of eBabel, as we at TeleRead say from time to time. I hope he’ll start using the same term.
While deploring incompatibilities, Farhad doesn’t get into all the nuances, just vaguely referring to “copy-protection schemes” that restrict use of books.
But TeleRead community members know the basics here. Proprietary DRM turns nonproprietary ePub into a proprietary format—e.g., Adobe-DRMed ePub. And of course, despite some encouraging hints from Amazon, Kindles so far can’t read ePub directly with or without DRM.
The good news is that even Kindles can handle books from a variety of sources. Of course, in many cases you have to be reasonably technical, and most book-buyers aren’t. What’s more, in the U.S., you can’t legally convert DRMed books from one format to another—collateral damage from Draconian anti-piracy laws.
At any rate, Farhad’s main points here are well taken with or without DRM fully explained. The proprietary mania, among other joys, limits your choice of books and jeopardizes the chances of your being able to access them forever with new e-reading gizmos. Given the heavy investment that some large publishers are making in e-books, the last thing they need is bad publicity about the DRM they’re so intent on using. But oh how they deserve it!
Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt from the Slate piece, in cases it vanishes from the Net eventually:
…buying any e-book reader now is a gamble. Every model has access to a different catalog of books, some of which are restricted by copy-protection schemes. This leads to a classic early-adopter format dilemma: Say you’ve got 30 e-books on the Kindle you purchased two years ago. Now you’re in the market for a new reader, and you’re leaning toward the Nook because it lets you share books with your friends. Tough luck—those Kindle books won’t work on your Nook. Or imagine you buy the Nook today, but by 2012 Barnes & Noble decides to quit the e-book business because it can’t compete with Amazon. Too bad—your Nook will be about as useful as an HD-DVD player. (For this same reason, I cautioned against buying Blu-ray players last year, and I’m sticking with the same advice this year.)
