I agree, in the real world a UL is likely to be inpractical ... but while still dreaming ...
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Originally Posted by rlauzon
If the Universal Library goes under, or has a data loss, you lose your book investment.
If the UL doesn't support the device you want to read your eBook on, you are out of luck.
If the UL drops a book you want, you can't re-authenticate to read it and you can't read it again
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That's a bad thing in a free society.
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Absolutely a worry about a Universal Library (more a bookshelf actually while I think about it) going under. Ideally it would be a not-for-profit quango, with a government support net, backed by major publishers, giving it more longevity.
I wouldn't see the device or reader being a major issue - more the docuemnt format - this would probably support a limited number of open standards, it's DRM schema should also be open - thus standardising DRM on an open system (if you have to have it, best it is open and common) and also driving format standards - the question would be more about your device supporting the content standard rather than the UL (I'd envisage the openDRM element built into the content wrapper - you put the complexity hear, simply have a minor communication protocol at the device level).
Dropping books - again, in an ideal world, the repository would be abstracted from the DRM serving mechanism - this would be a publicly owned store - so nothing ever gets dropped or deleted and there would be no chance of it going under (without servre political turmoil).
Well that's a bit more detail to the dream, and it's major drawback is that it relies on , albeit infrequent, internet access.