[NatCh]

Originally Posted by seajewel

Yeah, I'd be upset too. But the tone of some of the complaints has gone beyond grumbling over the fast pace of technology into some really personal sony is out to screw early adopters type of tone, which is what I don't understand.

Weeeellll. Sony has done some things that have rubbed folks the wrong way in the past, so there's always a bit of ... willingness to assume the worst, shall we say? Given a couple of things they've pulled (not the Reader team people, entirely other divisions of Sony), such wariness is even understandable.

Originally Posted by FizzyWater

So, do the listed firmware improvements (such as [nonDRM'd] PDF reflow) work if you DON'T install Digital Editions to your computer?

The reflow is part of the firmware, so it shouldn't be affected one way or the other without DE. You can always do the firmware upgrade, without installing DE, and see if you can reflow a PDF.

Has anyone done such a thing yet who can comment on it?

Originally Posted by FizzyWater

I guess I don't understand how epub is any different from any other site- or hardware-specific DRM scheme. If I am required to "authorize" with Adobe (which gives them permission to log your activities online and maintain all kinds of fun information about you on their databases), why is epub being hailed as "the end of e-babel"?

That's quite a can of worms, FizzyWater. The simpler point first: most folks have found with the Reader (which also limits you to 6 devices) that 6 devices is generally sufficient for most purposes, so long as you are limited to 6 devices at a time rather than 6 devices period.

As to why some think epub may be the end of e-Babel ... that's the somewhat complicated point, so bear with me a bit.

The only real way for e-Babel to fall is for a single format to become a "standard" for e-books. For this purpose it doesn't really matter which format, so long as everyone agrees upon and uses it (and it's usable). So the question then becomes, "why do we think epub is likely to become that standard?" (de facto, if not officially)

There are some things about it that make it technically a good choice. It's open in the sense that the details of the standard are publicly known. It's not "owned" by anyone, but is administered by the IDPF (much as HTML is administered by the W3). The actual way information is handled within it lends itself to reflowing, so it will work easily on multiple screen sizes.

Those are all good and important things, but in my estimation the biggest factor in its favor is Adobe.

PDF came very, very close to being a de facto e-book standard, despite the fact that it's really poorly suited for the role.** And that was with Adobe mostly ignoring the matter. The phenomenon was driven primarily by Adobe's name recognition and easy availability of the various Acrobat softwares.

With epub we have a format that has all that Adobe related horsepower, that's actually suited to the purpose of e-books, and Adobe is not only paying attention, but actively pushing. All of which makes it pretty attractive to the average user, and it's not "owned" by anyone, so that makes it attractive to the content providers. The fact that it can support DRM is a bonus the content providers, and the fact that it would be a single type of DRM is less of a burden to the average user.

That's pretty much what all the hubbub is about, in a nutshell.



** The reasons why are complicated, and you can see find exhaustive discussions on the site with a bit of searching. The big hitter is that PDF is a format preservation format. Its specifically designed purpose is to allow you to print a file on your printer and have exactly the same output I do printing the same file on my printer. Up until this reflow thing on the 505, you couldn't easily take the content text and display it on a screen that wasn't the same size (and they're usually smaller) as the "page" the file was "printed" onto, usually A4/Letter Size ... unless you have a magnifier, or microscopic vision.