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Originally Posted by NatCh
Hey, nekokami, nice idea!
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Thanks!
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Originally Posted by NatCh
As I'm typing this, it occurs to me that you may rather have meant that the only DRM type that Sony supports is their own, as opposed to also supporting eReader, MobiPocet, etc.
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Yes, this was very careless wording on my part. I meant what you said, that the only DRM supported by Sony is their own. I'm well aware that iLiad doesn't support
any DRM yet, but they're supposed to announce something this month. (Well, ok, go ahead and laugh... maybe next month, anyway!) My hope is that the iLiad will end up supporting more DRMs than Sony, because they don't have a vested interest in selling content. And my hope in writing this letter to SFBC was to get them to look at the situation and, if they felt they must have a DRM (which I don't like any better than the rest of you), they'd tell iRex what DRM they want to use and cut a deal.
The point is, iRex says they want to have a B2B model. That means they need to find someone else to provide content. An online book club seems ideal for this. You could buy the reader from the book club, hopefully at a discount of some kind and with a bunch of initial books thrown in for free, the same way they do club subscriptions now. Then, on the appropriate day (or next time after that when you power up), your iLiad would remind you that it's time to check your book club picks, and if you click "OK" you'd get a page notifying you of upcoming titles for the month, so you could check off the ones you want and the reader would download them. (It would need to check to make sure you have enough memory, or tell you to swap cards or whatever). Even better, you could ask for some sample pages, the way you can with pBooks when buying from Amazon. If you miss the day, you should still be able to go back and pick up titles from previous months, just as you can usually do now with these club memberships.
Sounds like a great business model to me, and a very convenient service that I'd be happy to buy the device for. (I do still need to be able to use it to read and annotate my PDFs for grad school, and handwrite/convert my journal and design notes, etc., of course!)
@VillageReader, thanks for the note about SF&F and other SF related magazines available at Fictionwise. I saw those before. Of course, we'll need to get a supported DRM onto the iLiad before this would work, as these volumes are currently locked down (though more than one format is supported, at least). Once we have that, yes, I plan to subscribe to several magazines this way, as it would massively reduce clutter in my house.
Perhaps others could also write to some of these companies and post their letters here... would it be worth it to do an online petition? Does anyone ever pay attention to those, or are they just to make the petition participants feel like they're doing something?
neko