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Originally Posted by dordale
I have to agree with this...It really doesn't make sense for B&N to try and push a different DRM scheme for ePub when there are so many readers coming out now that support Adobe Adept DRM.
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If they develop their own DRM, they don't have to pay the Adept licensing fees. Those are, I gather, rather expensive. Also, B&N may be hoping to license its method to other booksellers, either because it's cheaper, or because it appeals to more people than the license-specific-devices method.
It's possible that firmware updates for eReader's credit card DRM would be easy to write for various devices, and since Adept doesn't require exclusivity, both forms could exist on the same device.
I rather like that they're coming up with a different ePub DRM; I think this is exactly the kind of nuisance that is required to push the general public into an awareness of DRM and ebook formats.
I spend some time at Yahoo!Answers, answering questions about ebooks... and there are a lot of people who ask "I got an ebook and I get an error message when I try to open it; how can I read ebooks on my computer?" and "how do I turn my Word document into an ebook so I can sell it?" and "I want to sell my ebook; can I make it so people can't copy it?"
There's an utter lack of awareness that filetypes even *exist*, much less that DRM bits are thrown on top of those to prevent some uses of the file.
Multiple DRM methods for the same filetype is likely the only way DRM is going to get any direct attention; so far, most people think of ebooks as tied to a specific reading program you get from the ebookstore, rather than computer files that could be read by many programs if it weren't for the DRM.