Quote:
Originally Posted by =X=
Right and that is what scares me. With MOBI/LIT one company had complete control of the clients developed, to ensure MOBI/LIT worked across whatever device was developed.
ePUB does not benefit from this and with a very loosely defined standard I see a bumpy road for ePUB.
I really want ePUB to succeed but fear without a conforming ePUB standard there will be many solutions of ePUB that will not work different devices.
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Actually EPUB is as loosely defined as XHTML+CSS which is plenty successfull. And the fact that there isn't one company guiding it's development is an advantage not otherwise. It will reach the level of maturity of MOBI (a much simpler format) far more quickly as a result. As for the 300K file limit that everyone keeps complaining about, it's really not an issue. It just requires tool support in epub creation tools.
As for DRM incompatibilities, DRM by its very nature has to be incompatible. If we had a DRM scheme was not incompatible across devices and software implementations, it would be like a PDF password.
DRM stands for Digital RIghts
Management which means that publishers want to be able to manage what you are allowed to do with the book. If a DRM scheme allows a book to be used in many different software programs and devices, it is completely failing to provide any management.
As for the question of extensions, I think having one extension with various incompatible DRM schemes is an excellent thing. The time of ebooks and EPUB has come, nothing is going to stop them. This sort of craziness will hurt only one thig, DRM.