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Originally Posted by HarryT
Now come on, I know you're a fan of ePub, but you know as well as I do that the addition of Adobe DRM to ePub makes it no more (and no less) "open" or "standard" than any other format out there, and most certainly does not represent any end to "eBabel".
I'm not aware of any commercial eBook store selling DRM-free ePub books (please correct me if I'm wrong about that), and since the Sony Reader line is currently the only portable device which can read those, DRM-encrypted ePub books (aka "Adobe Digital Editions") are no more "portable" or "open" than any other format on the market.
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oh, i completely agree with you, drm is the plague. but,
Pan MacMillan *already* offers drm-free epub, as does
O'Reilly, and possibly more that i am not aware of. and of course there is the huge catalogue of books available through feedbooks (PD and CC works), all of which are available in drm-free epub. i think it's important to keep the two issues (drm and epub) separate ; epub does not automatically mean drm. and "open" does not mean "no drm", it means "not proprietary" ; epub absolutely *is* an open format, and while it may be more recent than some formats it is in fact
the official industry standard.
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Certainly as things stand at the moment, formats such as MobiPocket make an eBook readable on a vastly wider range of devices than does ADE, which is why I continue to regard it as a more "portable" format than ePub/ADE. Perhaps that will change in the future - we have no way of knowing.
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epub can be read natively by the sony already, as you say ; bookeen has also promised support for it via a firmware upgrade, and in the meantime the mobipocket reader will automatically convert it, making it readable on any device supporting mobipocket. and even though converting to mobipocket for reading is a stopgap measure as it does obviously mean you lose some of the advantages of epub, nonetheless for an archive format it is far superior.