Quote:
Originally Posted by eReaderPlanet
I understand publishers' fears of piracy, but I also think the consumer has the right to do what they want with their own property.
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When you buy a book, the book is your property; the content isn't. With printed books, the content pretty much travels with the book, so if you sell it or give it away, you lose access to the content as you lose possession of the book. When you buy a printed copy of
The Great Gatsby, you don't come into ownership of that content. You have acquired an object that presents the content.
The problem is that ebooks are essentially content, and the reading device or software is the object that presents the content. In this way, ebooks are fundamentally different from printed books. DRM, as I understand it, is an attempt to make ebooks more like printed books, but it's an unsatisfactory solution since, in the end, they're just not the same kind of thing. The difference between printed books and ebooks is
ontological, and DRM schemes can't really get around that.
Getting back to the actual topic, and speaking as someone who has yet to buy a dedicated reader device, I see this move on Sony's part as a good thing, and it inclines me to think more seriously about buying a Sony. For one thing, this will put pressure on Amazon to follow suit, since it will cost them market share. The academic market is potentially huge and if it will favor the ePub format, which makes sense to me (for one thing, the anglophone academic market is pretty international, and Amazon isn't), then Amazon stands to lose if they don't get on board with ePub.
This is a bold move on Sony's part, not because of anything to do with DRM, but simply in providing a major nudge toward an ebook market that doesn't tie content to specific devices. As much as they might like to tie people to their devices, they can probably discern that the people who are willing to be tied are probably going to get Kindle anyway, because Kindle has the best selection and prices. I mean, if you don't care about lock-in, and you're in the US, why
wouldn't you go with Kindle? Sony is gambling that there are a lot of people who
do care, including the large and lucrative academic publishers (textbooks and scholarly books), and the international anglophone market. They also know that by choosing to compete in the ePub market, they'll drive content prices down, including their own, but they see it as leading to greater volume and more profit in the end. That's what makes it bold.
Todd