Quote:
Originally Posted by 6charlong
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.
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I think that all the publishers have to do to break Amazon's hold on marketing books is sell them cheaper through a different vendor. Or become their own vendor. They sell through Amazon because they are making money and it is the path of least resistance. The very minute they figure out a way to make as much or more money on their own they will abandon Amazon. Many go with Kobo etc. as well, but it is more of the same. Amazon does it slightly better and they sell other stuff as well so an Amazon account is multi use for those that value convenience.
Publishers will not abandon DRM until all of those pesky people (the vast majority?) who are unaware of are or don't care about DRM as they just want to read the book once or twice have disappeared from the face of the earth. Sooner will probably be later than we think.
Helen