[Barcey]

So here's something I was thinking about while walking the dog.

In the traditional paper book world there are well understood categories for books where the purchaser has an idea of the durability of the book and how it will fit in their library shelf. You can decide to buy paperback, trade or hardcover editions to best suit your needs.

For electronic books there is just a junkyard of terms that the average purchaser doesn't understand or their eyes glaze over. Is it time for the industry to subcategories the ebook category into descriptive standards that the general user can understand? I'm a techie so I tend to think in terms of volatile and nonvolatile so for lack of a better term I'll use those to describe what I'm thinking.

Non Volatile eBooks
Attributes
- transportable (ability to read on multiple readers)
- long term accessible

Requirements
- Open Standard format
- or proprietary format with a legal and vendor sanctioned method to convert to open standard in the future
- no DRM
- or legal and vendor sanctioned method to remove DRM in the future or convert to another DRM format

Examples: TXT, HTML, ePUB, non DRM PDF

Volatile eBooks
Attributes
- Bound to specific device (lifetime expected to be life of reading device)
- Bound to specific vendor (lifetime expected to be life of vendor in the ebooks market)
- non transportable

Requirements
- Closed or proprietary format
- DRM protected

Examples: Mobipocket, BBEB, LIT, Kindle, DRM PDF etc....

Self Destruct eBooks
Attributes
- Designed to become unreadable after a fixed period of time for rentals or library books

Examples: Timed PDF


What do others think? I know that vendors wouldn't be too interested in marketing their ebooks as "volatile" but that's kind of the point. Maybe companies would consider developing a conversion utility that would be freely available in the event they exit the market if it means they would be categorized as non volatile rather then volatile. I know it's poor terminolgy but maybe someone has better ideas.