David Pogue, the New York Times tech columnist who has worried that E means piracy, will be participating in a laudable O’Reilly experiment involving nonDRMed PDF, Mobipocket and ePub.
The Pogue book served up this way will be Windows Vista: The Missing Manual.
And significantly, he’s "encouraging O’Reilly to adopt some antipiracy steps, like adding a footer at the bottom of each page that says, ‘This edition specially prepared for bgates@microsoft.com (or whatever your e-mail address is). That might deter people from posting their copies online for all to download.’
Wow. Sounds like social DRM. Nice going, David! The best arrangement would be nothing—that’s what I’ll do with my forthcoming book—but this sure beats the normal DRM.
Detail: Above link is PW-protected. I hope to replace it with one that isn’t.
From the Oreilly announcement: “While we would have liked to make these ebooks available sooner, we felt it was important to first contribute to building some of the tools needed for other publishers to follow our lead, such as enhancements to the open-source DocBook XSL stylesheets, which can now generate EPUB from DocBook XML source files.”