Once, when I was visiting the Library of Congress, I came across two displays on opposite sides of a hallway. One was a medieval manuscript of the Bible, the other was an early edition of Gutenberg’s printed Bible. I was doubly amazed. Both were not only beautiful works of art, both looked remarkably similar. If the labeling on the two displays had been switched, I’m not sure I would have noticed.

Gutenberg had matched the quality of the best hand-made manuscripts of his day. We need to do the same. Ebooks really won’t really arrive until the devices and the book formatting standards allow an ebook to be at least reasonably close the the visual standards of a well-done printed book.

My expectation is that we’re going to see maybe a dozen DRM’ed mutants of ePub because it is the “obvious” way to enforce territoriality. Think of it as a way of region-locking content (Like DVDs).

A universal DRM means universal pricing and universal distribution (once consumers get wise to the ways of IP-spoofing). So, my expectation is the publishers (who are antsy about Amazon’s model of a universal reader with region-specific catalogs) will seek to balkanize the market through the hardware side, with different DRMs for different regions, much like the HD video market has been broken in two; one disk standard for China and one for the rest of the world.
All it takes is a slight modification to, say, Mobile ADE, to get it to look for a territory-specific flag/key.

I expect we’ll see the first region specific DRM’s come out of China, then one for India, Korea, maybe Japan, probably France and western europe…