[dos]

Originally Posted by taming

Warning: this post includes some wild speculation

Imagine that you are a member of a book club with eight members. Each person has his or her own Kobo reader, and each person has a Kobo account or a Borders account--whatever. If the Kobo could somehow sync books from several different accounts, then it would be possible for the eight book club members to take turns buying a single book, and then just let the other members of the club include that book in with his or her own. In eight months, each person could buy only one book yet have eight new reads. So from that perspective it surely could be said to be a DRM thing.

Now, that being said, is there a way that Kobo could verify that the Taming with the Kobo account and the Taming with the Borders are, in fact, the same person and somehow link the two--well, perhaps they could. The part missing from this happy circumstance could very well be financial.

Although Borders owns a percentage of Kobo, they are not one company. It is probably not to either Kobo or Border's advantage financially to make this kind of thing happen. The ability to sync from one account only can be a powerful reason to buy from only one bookseller--and Borders wants it to be Borders, whilst Kobo wants it to be Kobo. Heck, I would love it if the books I buy from Sony could sync, too, while we are at it.

Financial considerations aside, perhaps Kobo and Borders (in the US and Australia) and the other financial partners will, at some point, decide to have a common sync function for all the Kobo associated stores, but I'm guessing it is not all that high on anyone's list right now.

Everything you said could very well be the reason for this but it seems like it could be possible to tie your device(s) to multiple stores, but only one of each store. Maybe have some kind of account manager built into the Kobo's OS. It would be no different from where we're at now, just the Kobo is smart enough to deal with more than one store at a time. Each store itself thinks that one Kobo is actually being used for it's own store. Hard to explain, just pretend it's like multitasking or running in parallel. I'm not sure how a setup like this would allow people to share books.

Anyway, people interested in not paying for books or sharing their own books can just break DRM on ePubs and share away, so it's kind of moot. Again DRM only hurts people trying to use the device and stores within the boundaries of what is legal. DRM sucks and it's probably not Kobo's fault directly.

Here comes the ePUB defense part: Fortunately, there are other ways to load the books, so even if you can only sync with one store, you can still buy your books from two, or three, or four.

Unfortunately, the way Kobo handles ePubs vs. it's own format is kind of clumsy. You can't sync your purchased ePubs to your account and thus can't use them within the Kobo desktop app, or iPhone/other smartphone apps.

For me, a large part of what makes Kobo awesome is the ability to read a book across multiple devices. I can use my reader at home or when I have my bag with me, my iPhone when I'm out somewhere and don't feel like carrying my stuff around, and the desktop app when I feel like reading on my monitor while I'm at work eating lunch or something.

I'm sure there's either:

1.) A way to be able to use multiple different stores on the same device. I don't profess to know how this would work, but I'm sure people smarter than me can figure out a way to do this while staying within the ridiculous boundaries of DRM and copyright laws imposed on us all by greedy fools.

2.) A way to use ePubs in the same manner as you would use the Kobo native format: the ability to place ePubs into the Kobo desktop app, and thus have them tied to your account in the cloud, accessible from any device where you can log in to your Kobo account This seems like the easiest way, and less likely to cause money grubbing content fascists to have conniptions.

I hope Kobo finds a way, it would go a long way towards their admirable goal of openness.

EDIT: Option 2 also has the added "benefit" of keeping the user locked in to one store, which will keep the capitalists happy.