Monday, February 14, 2005
L. Scott Redford On eBook DRM Standards
Posted by Janak Parekh in "ARTICLE" @ 11:00 AM
"No easy way exists to loosen the DRM grip--this complicated issue can't be addressed with good old-fashioned guilt and fear. But e-book standards for DRM and formats would help...Microsoft, Adobe and Palm and the others now have their own special technology fee tacked on to the price of e-books. And that complicates merchandising. We e-book merchants would rather not have multiple cost structures for the same e-book...Nothing is more frustrating than having three different libraries on your handheld and forgetting where your recent fiction resides. I don't just hear customers complaints--I myself own a handheld."
L. Scott Redford, president of Diesel eBooks, summarizes the biggest problem with ebook solutions today. While I'd prefer having no DRM at all, barring that I too would like one standard so that I don't need three different readers on my PDAs. My problem is that I disagree with his assertion -- we haven't seen standardization in the digital audio world, and I don't think we'll see standardization in the digital eBook world either. I hope I'm wrong. :|
L. Scott Redford, president of Diesel eBooks, summarizes the biggest problem with ebook solutions today. While I'd prefer having no DRM at all, barring that I too would like one standard so that I don't need three different readers on my PDAs. My problem is that I disagree with his assertion -- we haven't seen standardization in the digital audio world, and I don't think we'll see standardization in the digital eBook world either. I hope I'm wrong. :|
