Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
The best solution would be for one reflowable format to be prevalent without DRM. That would solve the Tower of eBable issue we currently have.
|
Best solution for who? DRM is a fact of life and unless someone can find a better way to satisfy publishers we are stuck with it so get over it. There are ways to improve DRM.
Long before I started using mobile books I was using Bible programs on my computer. There is an interesting phenomenon in that market that may be applicable here. All major publishers in that market use DRM - so if you can't trust a Pastor who can you trust? No one that I know complains about DRM in that camp since it is a fact of life. Now having said that there was a movement many years ago to adopt a single format among the manufactures, publishers of these programs. It was called STEP and I bought into it. The DRM was actually the same in all STEP books no matter who you bought from and the books could be freely moved between applications as well. It worked wonderfully.
Then Parsons (the company behind STEP) was purchased a couple of times and the impetus of XML appeared and every programmer on the planet wanted to adopt the format so slowly the STEP support eroded and will likely disappear completely, to be replaced by several other "standards." Vendors provides upgrades for customers to their new format and even upgrades to competitor books. In some cases these were free and in some cases these were cheap to cover the copyright expenses for the author so I ended up spending quite a bit of money upgrading considering the number of books I own. Since these are study books, not just reading books, you never really get done with them.
I am not exactly sure where I am going with this but to say that even when there is a solution it may fall apart after a few years. By the way, these same companies are in the mobile market as well but they don't allow the same license to cover the mobile version and you have to rebuy books you already own although discounted. There is quite a bit of work needed in this market as well. I really wish I could integrate my mobile reading to include these books too. (For more information on this topic see my web site.) Sorry for the rambling but mobileread does not have a forum topic for this kind of discussion. Thanks for reading.
Dale