Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami
So Adobe, a company that basically has NOTHING to do with ebooks, is the main controlling entity of EPUB and its DRM.
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Yes.
Is this new to you?
I thought it was common knowledge since 2009 that "epub is what adobe says it is". That is the main reason epub3 has gotten nowhere so far. Everybody is waiting for the adobe santioned implementation.
Back in 2008-2009 there were a few skirmishes over epub3 implementation because different developers were interpretting the vagaries in the spec in different ways. Since Sony surrendered their platform to Adobe and dismantled their ecosystem in favor of Adept all the second tier vendors followed suit and started shipping thinly (if at all) disguised versions of ADE mobile as their reader software because they expected Adept-DRM epub to become a "universal" ebook standard. The result was that any software producing epubs, even DRM-free epubs, was expected to produce adobe-compliant epubs. The way it was treated by developers was: "it doesn't matter what the spec says, if it doesn't render in Adobe it is up to you to change the file".
Adobe has never had to answer to anybody because the multinational publishers use Adobe software and they were not about to change their internal practices, which have long been geared towards producing and archiving pdfs.
So Adobe can push everybody else around at will and lately they have started pushing the publishers around with impunity. So far, nobody has stood up to them. Even Amazon and Apple kiss the ring of Don Adobe.
(Even if it is purely lip service.)