Comments on: Bill McCoy, Adobe e-booker, leaving company: Prominent ePub advocate

By: pond

pond — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:57:58 +0000

So, does this mean we have 2 giant corporations battling it out for ebook monopoly? Adobe (and all epub flavors from major publishers that use Adobe’s DRM for their epub editions) and Amazon (with their own gigantic retailing, publishing, customer list, and Kindle-proprietary DRM).

To me it now looks as though Step One in the program to launch ebooks was the epub standard — one open standard. This step is just about here.

Step One Point Five is to get tools for creating epub books, and reading epub books, into the hands of authors and readers alike (this won’t happen until there’s an export/import function in OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Word for epub). This step is only partially implemented; it has a long way to go, but it’s only a question of software, so it could happen quickly.

Step Two then will be, when the independent publishers start offering DRM-free epub editions, and the general reading public wakes up to just how limiting DRM is, and starts to pressure the big publishers into selling DRM-free editions. (Maybe beginning with ‘deluxe editions’ for higher cost, that come without DRM that is applied to the ‘mass market’ cheaper ebooks?)

Still a ways to go, but maybe we are making progress.

By: Mike Perry

Mike Perry — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 03:27:25 +0000

I wish I could say that Adobe had taken my advice (above), but the time gap is far too small. One of Adobe’s blogs just reported this:

“As part of a restructuring announced yesterday, Adobe has made the decision to expand its investment in digital publishing, creating a new organization focused on delivering products to increase digital revenue opportunities for book, newspaper and magazine publishers.”

Source: http://blogs.adobe.com/digitaleditions/2009/11/adobe_expanding_investment_in_digital_publishing.html

By: Mike Perry

Mike Perry — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 18:19:49 +0000

Let’s hope Adobe’s restructuring includes more tools to work with the rapidly growing field of etexts, particularly in the ePub format. Acrobat can do amazing things with PDF. We need similar tools to work with ePub documents.

By: Jim Lester

Jim Lester — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:34:51 +0000

I’m very sad to see Bill go.