I read the report. Pretty much "so what?" as expected. I suppose these big bureaucracies have to produce reports like this because they can't just say "everyone knows X". So essentially they've produced a report to say that proprietary formats exist and closed ecosystems dominate ebook sales but that it would be a good idea if everyone adopted an open standard, EPUB3 specifically, and interoperable DRM systems would be good too.
It's not so much whether this "research" has uncovered anything new (it hasn't) it's what they're going to use it to support - at the one end it could be some vague campaign trying to get vendors to support standards, at the other maybe legislation mandating that they need to provide mechanisms to transfer ebooks (indeed digital goods in general).
I was curious to come across this in the section about KF8:
Quote:
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In addition, Kindle’s terms of use explicitly forbid transferring ebooks sold through Amazon to other non-Amazon devices.
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Is this true even for non-DRM'd books sold through Amazon?