3 ms·
Lack of epub is an issue. Amazon's format, in addition to being proprietary, is a weird and hard to deal with (due to historical PalmOS-related baggage). Also
by dunham 14y ago
Lack of epub is an issue. Amazon's format, in addition to being proprietary, is a weird and hard to deal with (due to historical PalmOS-related baggage). Also, I believe that the epubs tend to have more future-proof data (cleaner HTML, etc).
However, I have no sympathy for these publishers on the DRM front. If they want DRM then they can pay the piper (i.e. Amazon/Apple). I personally don't see a lot of merit in this lawsuit as long as Apple, Amazon, etc. allow users to load their own third party books onto the devices. (And you can make your own books for the devices.)
Nobody is stopping them from selling books for the iPad/Kindle, lots of publishers like O'Reilly and Baen do. They're just stopping them from using Amazon/Apple's DRM without paying Amazon/Apple for the privilege. The same thing happened with music, and the industry eventually decided to drop the DRM. (And I think Apple is still selling a decent amount of music without it.)
- lawnchair_larry 14y agoI think you have it backwards, they do not want DRM. This is not the publishers suing, this is booksellers.
- jamesbritt 14y agoThey want something they refer to as "open source" DRM, but they seem to have some unique meaning for that phrase.
- dunham 14y agoThe bookstores are asking the court to issue an injunction prohibiting the publishers and Amazon from “selling e-books with device and app specific DRMs,” while also requiring the big six publishers to allow independent bookstores to directly sell open-source DRM e-books. It sounds like they are asking the courts to order some kind of "open source DRM" that they can use. If they don't want to use DRM, Kindle and iBooks work great today. If they don't want anyone to use DRM, then the article is misrepresenting them.