Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I should be able to buy a Ford car and get spare parts for it from Volvo. I should be able to use Canon lenses on my Nikon DSLR. Face the facts: cross-manufacturer incompatibility is a normal business practice.
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And that is also exactly why it is also standard practice, amongst the more technically astute, to remove DRM from the books they buy and convert them to the formats they need. The manufacturers want to arbitrarily limit you to their platform. There is no technical reason for it. The motive for incompatibility lies elsewhere, no doubt rooted in profit.
While car parts may not be interchangeable in your example, the gasoline that powers the cars is interchangeable. While the internal workings of a Ruger revolver are not interchangeable with a Smith & Wesson revolver, the ammunition that is used in them is interchangeable. While the ink jet print heads used by a Hewlett Packard printer are not interchangeable with those used by a Canon printer, the paper you insert into their respective feed trays is interchangeable.
You are conflating the idea of a "manufactured component" and a "consumable". An eBook file is a consumable, not a component. They should be interchangeable.