Adobe Digital Editions 3.0 released

[Lynx-lynx]

Thank you Akshayy

[meeera]

Originally Posted by Akshayy

These are my personal opinions! What I know is software engineering and the things that go into making drm, since I studied computer science and that's it.

I don't own a dedicated eReader and don't read books(except science textbooks).

I, for one, would really like it if you would hold off on mocking those of us who know a whole lot more about certain aspects of the publishing and ereader world than you do. It's not wacko "conspiracy theory" to think that abandoned DRM schemes leave readers high and dry, that companies collude at the expense of readers, and so on. These are thoroughly established historical facts, albeit facts that people who don't read are unlikely to know about.

Discussion is great. Information-sharing is great. Uninformed mockery, not so much.

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by Akshayy

The library won't be happy with you reading the book outside the loan period!
This instead gives me an idea. Time used based loan instead of fixed period loan.
The library could allow you to read for 200 hrs over many years. Instead of fixed 1 week loan.. interesting idea.

But then they couldn't lend the book to anyone else.

My library has the same lending policies they have with paper except you could keep the paper book longer if you paid the fine.

For me the no fine thing and the fact that I don't have to go to the library to return an ebook makes up for having to check out the book again if I haven't finished it.

Helen

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by BookCat

I hope Alf finds a way to deal with this new monster.

This amounts to treating your customers as potential pirates, rather than greeting them with open arms and a smile. It's enough to send good, moral, law-abiding people into the arms of

Originally Posted by meeera

Is this Adobe's official position? "Bad luck about your ereader, but you can always read sitting at your PC or squinting at your phone"?

I thought that the book publishers/producers/libraries are Adobe's customers.

We do pay the fee indirectly of course, but we don't actually buy anything from Adobe.

Adobe's customers want bigger and better DRM so Adobe has no choice but to supply it or someone else will eventually.

I don't care for the inconvenience of DRM but I am pretty sure that without it the availability of ebooks and library borrowing would be curtailed significantly. Not a good thing IMO.

Right or wrong it is the publishers etc. who are Adobe's customers and Adobe must do what they are requested to do or risk losing the business.

Helen

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by fjtorres

Me, I think Adobe is doing the new DRM in response to MacMillan's TOR experiment.
If going DRM-free made no difference in piracy rates, why encrypt at all?
So Adobe is trying to convince the BPHs that instead of ditching DRM, they need to double down with tougher DRM.
Problem is, a tougher Adept DRM will make little market impact in most developed markets like the US because generic ADEPT ebooks make such a small portion of the ebook market. Amazon, Apple, and Nook control 86-90% of the market. More, epub pirates, faced with an "unbreakable" Adept DRM, can always buy from B&N and strip that DRM instead.
Which pretty much guarantees that publishers will see no change in piracy rates.

Sooner or later they're bound to realize that encryption DRM, whether interoperable or not, does nothing for them. Even then, I don't expect publishers to give up on the placebo of DRM, merely to switch to watermark DRM.

I'd love to see some evidence that piracy has decreased or that profits have increased. All I see is the statement that piracy hasn't increased. I know that they save $0.22 a book, but if this was making a meaningful difference in the bottom line, I would think that all of MacMillan and others would have gone DRM free by now.

Helen

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

I'd love to see some evidence that piracy has decreased or that profits have increased. All I see is the statement that piracy hasn't increased. I know that they save $0.22 a book, but if this was making a meaningful difference in the bottom line, I would think that all of MacMillan and others would have gone DRM free by now.

Helen

The adobe tax doesn't affect the publisher; it affects the consumer or the retailer who has to compete with Apple and Amazon. On one single file it isn't much but summed up across a year's worth of sales it adds up to millions of dollars worth of competitive advantage to the non-adobe vendors.

That it matters to the retailers, look to Kobo who invested time and money in Kepub to minimize their reliance on adobe DRM.

The publishers cling to DRM thinking it keeps piracy from getting worse and Adobe plays off those fears. And since they don't directly suffer the consequences, they'll stick with it a while longer until the evidence is so stacked they can't pretend anymore. But the same people that insist on DRM then bemoan the increasing concentration of sales in the single-vendor DRM camps.

[Kumabjorn]

Are you telling us that if Amazon priced their e-books at purchase plus 22 cents they price the competition out of business?

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

Are you telling us that if Amazon priced their e-books at purchase plus 22 cents they price the competition out of business?

Oh, the adobe tax isn't just the money (though it obviously hurts).
There is also the lack of control over the user experience, issues of user support, control over the software and the hardware. And, don't forget that they have to pay upfront fees on the servers and the sdk, and royalties on the hardware and software.
It adds up to a lot more than 22 cents per file.

Again, look at the epub3 deployment: aside from the bloat of the spec, there is the fact that until Adobe releases their final epub3 rendering engine nobody knows to a certainty how those files are going to render on their hardware. Remember how for years adobe clients had no answer to Amazon's whispersync because Adept *required* a PC to authenticate a file for download to the reader? That was the adobe tax at work. For years, users with authentication issues had to bounce between the hardware vendor and adobe and often neither could solve the issue. Adobe tax again.

Adobe has their clients by the throat and they move, if at all, on Adobe's schedule. That is the way they like it. Nothing illustrates their approach than this whole kerflufle.

Apple and Amazon move on their own; they control their fate and they alone answer to their customers. That is a plenty big competitive advantage right there. Kobo is to be greatly admired for surviving under the adobe yoke although one has to wonder how much stronger might they be if they were full masters of their domain.

[Kumabjorn]

Erudite, karma to you if Tapatalk allowed it.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

Erudite, karma to you if Tapatalk allowed it.

I don't know how Tapatalk for android operates, but Tapatalk for iPad allows you to select a post, then open it in a "Web View" where the karma button is accessible.

[cybmole]

no one has mentioned Overdrive / library books as yet ?

100s , maybe 1000s of libraries offer epubs via overdrive & with ADE DRM, will they be forced to migrate to the new scheme, is that even practical given their investment in books already at libraries ( we are talking millions of library owned epubs here ) & the huge customer base who are as of now borrowing books via overdrive onto all sorts of devices ?

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by cybmole

no one has mentioned Overdrive / library books as yet ?

100s , maybe 1000s of libraries offer epubs via overdrive & with ADE DRM, will they be forced to migrate to the new scheme, is that even practical given their investment in books already at libraries ( we are talking millions of library owned epubs here ) & the huge customer base who are as of now borrowing books via overdrive onto all sorts of devices ?

Oh, they'll probably update pretty quickly. After all, the customer is the library, not the reader, and it's apparently pretty easy to screw the libraries.

Besides, they're paranoid that libraries are just a way for people to steal/pirate books -- much more than if you buy it.

"Just use the app!"

[ShellShock]

Adobe says it is the publishers who are insisting that they harden their (Adobe's) DRM, to combat perceived loss of sales due to piracy. If this is the case, then will not the publishers also insist that Kobo harden the Kobo specific DRM that is used for kepubs (Kobo own epub wrapper)? Similarly for Amazon and Kindle's DRM, although Amazon is big enough to stand up to the publishers.

[Barcey]

Originally Posted by ShellShock

Adobe says it is the publishers who are insisting that they harden their (Adobe's) DRM, to combat perceived loss of sales due to piracy. If this is the case, then will not the publishers also insist that Kobo harden the Kobo specific DRM that is used for kepubs (Kobo own epub wrapper)? Similarly for Amazon and Kindle's DRM, although Amazon is big enough to stand up to the publishers.

I wouldn't be surprised if the publishers are trying to add performance clauses to the reseller contracts (and Overdrive contract) that "The ebooks will be protected with a secure DRM and if there is a known exploit it will be fixed within x months." The resellers would have been able to strike it out because Adobe couldn't commit deliver to it but with this new DRM they think they can deliver. If that's the scenario then all the resellers could be forced to upgrade the DRM.

I remember reading that Apple had a clause like that with the music publishers and that was part of the reason Steve Jobs came out and said he didn't want DRM in the first place and wanted to get rid of it. They were stuck in a battle of upgrading and then getting hacked again.

[Katsunami]

In the end, I think it doesn't matter.

After the DRM is cracked the first time, it'll be known how it works and what keys are needed to descrypt the books. Even if the loophole is closed, the DRM-scheme can be reverse engineered.

It might take 1-2 years, but I think that a lot of people have a To Be Read pile that will last at least that long. Not buying any books for two years will make a serious dent in it.

(Then again, the old DRM and ADE 2.0 HAVE to be supported for at least some time to come, because it's just impossible to bin all current EPUB readers in half a year. Some people are just buying them right now.)