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Why do we need a new format?
Why not just use HTML or PDF, formats almost all devices already understand?
Yes...the answer is DRM and in this lies the crux that neither OpenReader nor the idpf will ever be able to solve.
It's fear and greed and a thorough misunderstanding of simple facts.
The industry (publishers mainly and some autors too probably) believe that Piracy is dangerous to their profits. This is, IMHO opinion simple BS...!!!
Of course Piracy eats into profits...but it's minimal. The error the DRM apostels are making is, that they put two numbers together:
One is the number of Pirated books/games/vids/programs/cds/addwhatyoulike
The other is the number of $$ these would be worth if they were sold.
The problem is that these two numbers are only loosely associated.
Only a very few of those who would readily download a certain CD/book/whatever would actually pay for it. so taking these two values and putting them 1:1 is just plain stupid...but they insist on doing it anyway...so I have little hope.
Also, many people are actually driven towards piracy because it's often a lot easier to download something instead of buying it in a shop.
In a shop you might not get it, it might not be available in the version you want and many more factors play a role. In addition, Songs you download can easily be burned to a CD, cracked games run without problems on older CD drives and don't have copy protection related stutters, don't infiltrate your system with rootkits and stuff...I could continue this list.
I'm against Piracy, but I'm even more against making stuff so hard for the users that they choose the easy option (and cheap too) and simply pull it off the net.
For me the ideal DRM for a book would be a simple script that embeds the name and address of the owner in the file. This can be done with PDF and with other formats as well I guess. It's probably easy to remove, but who cares? Every copy protection so far has been more or less easy to remove...
The "individual stamp" would make casual sharing a bit unattractive but wouldn't endanger device compatibility and would also make DRM hassle-free for the end-user.
I'm no programmer type, but I imagine a little script could be used to inject the user information into a PDF file, put a write protect on the file and that's it. The user then has his "own" version of the book and can do as he pleases with it. He can't edit the text, but that's not something I'd like to do with fiction anyway...so no problem there. Annotation could still work because the annotation info would be stored seperately anyway...so why not.
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