Quote:
Originally Posted by AnemicOak
For O'Reilly books? No, they aren't DRM'd. The only books with DRM are ones where the publisher wanted it.
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Sooner or later the publishers will realize that if they want to break Amazon's hold on marketing books they will have to drop DRM. At that point competition between book sellers will be on customer service and features. Which brings me to the other part of the OP's question.
Books you buy from Barnes and Noble, Kobo, eBooks.com, Bain, etc., will all read on your Kobo eReader (or your Nook for that matter) but not all the features will be available. The Kobo will sync bookmarks, etc., only for eBooks bought on Kobo's servers and the Nook will only sync eBooks bought on their servers.
There is already considerable differentiation between book sellers on features, with 2 major releases of Amazon's format and 3 releases of ePub. At that level we find incompatibility although Kobo will download a book in either Kobo's kePub format by syncing or as a plain vanilla ePub download to your computer. ePub bought at another vender's site renders fine on a nook, and the B&N books (etc.) that I've bought can be read on either device as well, as long as the eReader was authenticated by connecting it to Adobe's free Adobe Digital Editions [ADE] program.
I forgot to mention that Calibre converts plain ePubs to kePubs just fine but not all the features of eBooks bought from Kobo will work in eBooks bought from another vendor.