Quote:
Originally Posted by Nancy Fulda
I suspect that when the dust settles, Amazon, B&N, and the other major players will have established a standard format for purchases and file transfers, and it will be possible to swap DRM-protected files across various devices that have been registered to the same person.
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I expect that when the dust settles, small publishers who don't use DRM will watch their businesses grow, while the large publishers who use DRM will continue to panic as bookstores go bankrupt and they fail to meet customers' interests for digital content.
Swapping DRM-protected content across devices registered to one person isn't possible if those devices don't all read the same filetypes; whatever solution they come up with for future ebooks won't work on the readers I currently own. I have no intention of buying another ereader just to read badly-OCR'd content I can't edit.
I'm sure plenty of people will be happy with whatever method Amazon comes up with--I'm also sure that plenty won't, and their literary future is going to be a lot more diverse and profitable in the long run.
Amazon has no incentive to make its files readable on the Nook. B&N has no incentive to sell to Kindle users. Both would rather people with different devices had to re-buy their books for the other platform. Since the purpose of the DRM is to prevent casual sharing, not piracy (which is going to happen no matter what they do; scanning the paper is always going to be an option), their solutions aren't going to be oriented toward customer usability but vendor lock-in, which they don't get from universal formatting standards.