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Originally Posted by Jane12
Thanks! Perhaps things will go okay with my Nook after all.
But this whole DRM situation is still maddening. I have a techno-phobic friend who finally decided to try ebooks and bought a Sony T2 last summer. While one would hope Sony will update the software on their latest reader (T3), I wouldn't count on it. And I'm highly doubtful that they will bother updating older models, like my friend's less-than-year-old T2, the T1 and PRS series, etc. Plus Sony has pulled their devices and bookstore out of the U.S. market, leaving my friend reliant on 3rd-party booksellers, like Kobo and Google Books.
Once booksellers and libraries start adopting this "hardened Adobe DRM," my friend won't be able to read any new books. And this is an ereader that's less than a year old and supposedly had the advantage of not being locked in to a single bookseller. Instead, she may soon be locked out of all booksellers and libraries. Does Adobe realize this is what's happening on the consumer end? Perhaps this new DRM will make the publishers happy, but it's a nightmare for the end-user -- i.e., the people who are just trying to read books.
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Don't worry, your friend will be okay with her Sony T2.
Just a word about Kobo: they are a Canadian company mated with a Japanese conglomerate, and worldwide they are a major player in ebooks. For the US market they chose to sell their products through independent bookstores. The Kobo readers have both the Adobe Mobile rendering engine and another one called ACCESS that is entirely independent of Adobe. Rakutan wanted their eReader to render text in Japanese, Chinese and Korean which the Adobe system couldn't do: hence dual rendering.
At the Kobo store you can buy standard (Adobe) ePub files and/or kePub files that support the Oriental languages. For the ePub you download an ACSM file to your PC and it will load the book you bought to Adobe ADE or the Sony Reader software, whichever you have associated with ePub files.
People do have to authorize their eReader with Adobe to use the Adobe Mobile rendering engine but if your friend has already purchased books from the Sony store then her T2 is already registered and it doesn't have to be done again.
I think it unlikely Sony will not update the Reader Mobile rendering engine used on the T1, T2 and T3 eReaders since they are still selling them outside the US, and because Sony is a responsible company. The fact they took the trouble to transfer customer's libraries to another company before they left the building is proof of that. What is yet to be seen is whether or not Kobo makes the ACCESS engine available on Sony equipment. If they do, it is much superior to the old Adobe ePub 2 engine. Adobe's ePub 3 engine is yet to prove itself.