Computerworld is out with a piece on DRM squabbles among Apple and Microsoft and the rest. How much will this harm Apple, especially with the iPhone coming out with a 3.5 inch, 160-dpi display fit for e-reading? Or will rival e-book-formats and DRM systems suffer instead, assuming that Apple has its own book format and DRM?
Related in CW: Experts debate: Is DRM good or bad for consumers? and a letter-to-the-editor, headlined How to Succeed at Publishing E-books. Reader Douglas Jones praises Baen‘s DRM-free publishing, in addition to condemning a nonBaen proposal to charge readers $3 to read a book just once.
And speaking of the Apple world: Don’t forget about the recently announced Mac tablet clone just mentioned by Bill Janssen—alas, “only $2,199” and up. You might also check out David Pogue’s iPhone-related New York Times column and a Time piece if you haven’t already. “Sounds like it might be what the Nokia N770 or the PepperPad could have been,” says Bill—excited by the iPhone’s potential Web-browsing capabilities for e-book-reading. Also see thread on eBook Community list.
Housekeeping—in more senses than one: There’ll be least one or two more TeleBlog items later in the day. Meanwhile the TeleMouse, aka Osama bin Mouse, is still at large. Thanks to all who shared extermination tips. Search-and-destroy will get more serious later in the week when I’m past some deadlines.
I’d say that we saw in the keynote what will be the preferred ebook format for the iphone:
HTML with top-notch rendering by the webkit engine.
It’s probably Osama bin Mice, not mouse. Maybe your pest control is working – it just takes a while to get rid of the whole bunch of them. We have a product called “Talon” in Australia thet is very effective, also comes in a little bait box which keeps it safely away from my backyard lizards. Now if I could just train to lizards to eat the mice…..
On the HTML issue for books – what is the main problem with using HTML for e-books? It seems quite effective because of the hyperlinks and being able to resize fonts etc. Is it just too easy to copy or alter or are there other issues?
[Moderator’s note: See this post. – David Rothman]