I think you’re both on the money about the issues, but what if Google or Amazon correctly sees the threat here and gets more active on ePub matters? The battle is far, far from over.

Meanwhile, except for the control issue, an important one, we’re better off than when there was no standard.

Not to minimize the control issue! I hope that in both the main area of the blog and the comment area, people will speak up.

Felix, want to do a full-length post on the rendering issues, etc.?

Thanks,
David

To me, the most important part of the Sony announcement is that they will support ePub… which means any other vendor (such as myself) can sell ePub that can be read natively on Sony’s reader. It does mean that I could not use any DRM except Adobe’s DRM system… but since I don’t use DRM anyway, that fact is immaterial to me.

So I am more concerned with the possibility of Adobe’s forcing further changes onto ePub coding by creating proprietary renderers… it would be a new Browser War, and no one needs that.

If Adobe limits its proprietary efforts to its DRM, fine, let them, as long as users can buy non-DRM ePub content from any source. But hopefully they will realize that the tighter they restrict formats and DRM, the fewer sources of literature will be available to the devices, and the fewer consumers will be interested in buying them…

2- Look to the support forums for the reader gadgets and the bug tickets for calibre; whenever a file does not display properly in ade, the answer always is: change the file. DRM doesn’t enter in it at all; in the here and now, ePub is what ADE says it is. Not what the standard says. If ADE doesn’t like a standard-compliant file, the expectation is that the file has to be changed. And with the widespread distribution of the ADE reader that Adobe has engineered, we are headed in a defacto ePub standard already.
In the early days of PCs there were as a perfectly open compatibility standard; if the device ran MS-DOS it was MS-DOS-compatible. But, if it also ran Lotus 1-2-3 and Flight Simulator, it was IBM compatible. Many MS-DOS compatibles from TI, Radio Shack and other vendors were clearly superior to IBM PCs.
The market went with IBM compatibility. And to this day, PCs are built to be able to boot 1-2-3 version 1.0.
If we’re not there yet, we’re 99% of the way.

Never mind the DRM: who controls the renderer?

A close-to-home topic. I’d love to see TeleRead have a bunch of fact checkers beyond some of the best checkers in the e-book world—TeleRead community members, from whom I want to hear when we are wrong!

Thanks,
David

David

Addendum: I’ve enjoyed Brad’s other work. But e-book standards are important, and here he blew the story.