Adobe Digital Editions in the new devices

[AprilHare]

Is it just me or are others getting the impression not a lot of these new liseuses are going to possess support of Adobe Digital Editions, or indeed any cross-device DRM support?
I just get this feeling the ebook market is going to get split up into dozens of companies and people will be restricted from purchasing and reading certain ebooks mainly because they chose the wrong company when buying their liseuse!
I'm grateful that Sony 'opened up' my PRS-500 by adding ADE support, but one would think that such a move be very unlikely for the Skiff et al.

[SensualPoet]

It's worth reminding ourselves here at Mobileread that we are all "early adopters" ... in spite of numerous anecdotal stories like "my mom gets it!".

It's a bit weird being an "early adopter", I know, since "reading" has been going on at least since some kindly forgotten Sumerian wrote down (chiseled?) the "Epic of Gilgamesh" four or five thousand years ago.

Sometimes critical mass is something to be desired and maybe that's coming for e-reading and e-readers in 2010. (Sometimes "critical mass" is a bad thing, especially if you are within a few hundred miles of an almost exploding atomic device.)

But patience, as my mom once said, is a virtue. ADE and other "solutions" will work themselves out. In the meantime, stop to smell (or munch on) the flowers like Ferdinand the Bull, my favourite childhood storybook hero would have advised.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by AprilHare

Is it just me or are others getting the impression not a lot of these new liseuses are going to possess support of Adobe Digital Editions, or indeed any cross-device DRM support?
I just get this feeling the ebook market is going to get split up into dozens of companies and people will be restricted from purchasing and reading certain ebooks mainly because they chose the wrong company when buying their liseuse!
I'm grateful that Sony 'opened up' my PRS-500 by adding ADE support, but one would think that such a move be very unlikely for the Skiff et al.

Skiff is bigger concept than just a dedicated ereader device - they intend to have software for laptops/tablets/smartphones etc. That said it seems they aren't interested in supporting viewing of content that doesn't in some way involve them in the food chain. A closed ecosystem, even more so than Amazon or Apple. In particular they haven't licensed Adobe Mobile Reader SDK AFAICT so the thing won't be reading ADE, or surfing the web. For people that just want to read their newspaper or magazine, and want a sexy piece of hardware, that probably doesn't matter.

But I think that's the exception rather than the rule in terms of dedicated ereaders. Even Amazon has licensed Adobe Mobile Reader SDK, even if they aren't supporting ADE yet (hopefully some day they will).

Non dedicated ereaders (tablets, notebooks, smartphones etc.) won't have this issue in general. You'll be able to put ADE compliant reader apps on them now or in the not distant future.