Thread: E-Books in ePub format actually being sold (BooksOnBoard)
View Single Post
Old 06-29-2008, 10:48 AM   #27
DMcCunney
New York Editor
DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.DMcCunney ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
DMcCunney's Avatar
 
Posts: 6,384
Karma: 16540415
Join Date: Aug 2007
Device: PalmTX, Pocket eDGe, Alcatel Fierce 4, RCA Viking Pro 10, Nexus 7
Quote:
Originally Posted by vivaldirules View Post
Help me out, again, please. Suppose Sony, Amazon, and everyone else adopt epub tomorrow and the mobile readers they sell support them. Publishers begin spitting out their works in that format and the vendors are selling them that way. Of course, each vendor (e.g., Sony, Amazon, etc.) will be attaching their own DRM to these. So when I go to buy a DRM'd ebook for my Sony Reader I will still only be able to buy them from Sony, right? So why should I care about epub? I can see the publishers would have to send out only one format of ebook to the vendors to sell and that might make some incredibly tiny difference to me by saving the publishers a few cents. But how else will this make a difference? Forgive me, I'm not trying to be argumentative - I'm just trying to understand something that I obviously don't right now.
eBook format and DRM are seperate issues.

ePub simply defines a comprehensive ebook format. If everyone supports it (which I don't see happening any time soon), you should be able to view an ePub formatted wbook on whatever you use to read ebooks. I'd be in favor: right now I use a Palm OS PDA an an ebook reader (among many other things), and must maintain five different viewer programs to cover all the bases and remember which books are in which format. That's just nuts.

Different vendors will use different DRM, but that's a separate issue. Whether you'll have to buy from Sony will depend on whether the reader will support the DRM method used. But how will that be any different from what you have to do now?

Personally, I see ePub as an intermediate "master" format, used by publishers. They mark up the book and genetrate an ePub file. That can be sold directly to customers who can view it native (few, at the moment), but it can also be converted to other formats like Mobi and Sony LRF, and that can happen automatically as part fo the ebook creation process.

I want a device independent format that will let me download an ebook once, and read it on whatever I happen to have viewer software for. If the DRM gets in the way, I don't buy the DRMed title. I can reluctantly tolerate DRM as a means of soothing the fears of content providers. I won't tolerate it as a means of locking me into a specific vendor's solution.
______
Dennis
DMcCunney is offline   Reply With Quote