Quote:
Originally Posted by geertm
But unlike Apple and Amazon (who do not license their DRM to anyone else), B&N has licensed its DRM to Abobe. The B&N DRM is included in the latest release of the Abobe software for e-reader devices and any manufacturer using the Adobe software can add support for the B&N DRM to their e-reader device.
Unfortunately not many have done so, so far. And the most important one, Sony, has chosen not to support the B&N DRM in their new e-readers.
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I think Amazon is continuing a policy that was in place before they acquired MobiPocket. If you wanted to license MobiPocket for your device, it had to be the only software that supported DRM. So you won't, for example, see a dedicated reader that has both MobiPocket DRM
and ePub DRM support. (Bookeen had to release a new device when they wanted to add ePub support, instead of adding it to their existing Cybook product.) There are devices that support both Mobi and ePub, but the ones I've seen use the open source FBReader product as the base. FBReader rolls its own Mobi and ePub support, and doesn't support DRM.
For Amazon, I suspect this is a matter of competition. They want to be the sole source supplier of ebooks to people using the Kindle or Kindle apps, which is why their DRM differs from the original Mobi DRM solution. But they
do offer the Kindle as a dedicated reader platform, and probably aren't enthusiastic about other dedicated readers that would directly compete with it and be able to buy books from the Amazon store.
We can hope Sony will reconsider. Sony wants to sell devices, and the devices need content. Sony made a big deal about migrating to ePub and being open, not restricting the Reader owner's choices of where to get content. B&N is a significant source of content, so not supporting it on the Reader is problematic.
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Dennis