Quote:
Originally Posted by dugbug
The DRM game will play itself out in a few years and we will have a standard ebook form at some point.
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To me that standard ebook format is already there and has been there for years. XML. We need nothing else. Any dialect of XML will do. All that's positive about XML as a data format plays out even more so when it comes to books. All the negative aspects of XML are of no relevance when it comes to books.
(Thanks to an XML version of Shakespear's plays and XSLT it took me about 30 minutes today to get all of them formated exactly the way I wanted them).
The digital publishing industry seems to be of the same opinion with their
.epub Format. If only they'd get rid of the idea, that locking up documents with DRM was a good idea ...
Sooner or later the firmware on eBook devices will fully support XLS / XSLT / CSS. As far as I am concerned, that will be the end for any non XML-based eBook format to me.
I can't - however - argue with HarryT's point, that some sort of DRM is useful when it comes to some kind of library scheme for e-books. Yet, I am pretty sure there are more elegant ways to do this too.