Quote:
Originally Posted by Sweetpea
This sentence got my mind wandering (not too difficult today btw)...
Music files were there long before any DRM schema was introduced. Those "protected" music files are a fairly recent invention. Music files are now highly popular, every knows them, and I'd say most people that have access to them (aka, have internet) have a portable player to play them.
Then book files... First, we had the PG library, all in plain text. But those are only old (or boring) books, and no bestsellers. So, only a few people know about these books and actually use/read them.
Then the bestsellers start popping up, but they generally are under some sort of DRM scheme. So people need to get used to a new medium (ebooks) but they can only use certain readers to read certain books. No wonder most people don't even think about ebooks as a next generation of reading books... (as they do think about music files as a next generation of listening to music).
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Going back to the original subject of this thread, I think Sweetpea is onto something. It was MP3 files that made music readily go digital. MP3 was so ubiquitous that even the iPod had to implement it. We now have a similar eBook encoding tool in ePub but so far only Sony has implemented it on their hardware. Maybe my only option is to wait and hope that either: 1. BeBook drops Mobipocket in favor of a different eBook rendering program, and 2. BeBook or some other company offers a small, inexpensive reader with good ePub support.
Frankly I'm appalled at the way DRM is being used on books. Amazon seems only to pretend to use it to protect copyrights while in fact, they are using DRM to prevent people from buying books from another bookseller. As Xenophon pointed out, there is so much confusion about what the copyright laws say that companies can get away with this sort of thing.
My search for a good, cheap 5-inch eInk reader led me to the BeBook Mini, and that led me to question the future of Mobipocket books in light of Amazon's change to a style of DRM that only works on the Kindle. Amazon's behavior is the most egregious example of how a bookseller can combine DRM and formatting for a purpose completely unrelated to copyrights. In the end, Amazon's new DRM-and-Mobi-format scheme has convinced me it is unsafe to get a reader that depends on Mobi.