[Olympus]

Another suggestion for publishing e-books.

Each buyer get's a personalised JPG showing the cover art an his/her purchase credentials. Similar to the current ISBN area - the coverart has a place to display your buying credentials in a 2D format. In the JPG is the text of the book "watermarked" (a technology that "hides" information in the unused bits of a picture).

The reading software uses the JPG as cover-art. When users starts reading the reading software extracts - on the fly - the text and keeps this in memory. Probably using a public/private key encription supplied by the PUBLISHER. Publishers should register a public/private key with the ISBN institute.

Should a user tamper with the JPG picture using Photoshop or Gimp then his books becomes unusable as the "hidden" bytes are incorrect. When he shares his "unaltered" copy then his "credentials" are shown on the JPG- cover.
Advanced piracy is not prevented but I accept that as a fact of life. Normal consumers just get all the advantages of a normal book without DRM, and can even share their books like in real life, but the reader is always reminded of the original purchaser by looking at the cover art that display's their registration credentials. It could/should be a automated service to insert the 2d credentials in the JPG, and hide the text in the JPEG from the ISBN-institute that currently issues the ISB Number ranges.

MobiPocket (current defacto standard) and the few readers currently available should be updated to perform this "trick" before e-books hit the mass market.
(I should "patent" this idea, but I prefer to donate this to the open source community)

Questions:
1: would you pass your copy of an e-book that is labeled with your credentials to pirates
2: what type of "credentials" would you allow a publisher to put on your e-cover
3: any suggestions ?