ePub supports DRM just as well as AZW Kindle books do. A major reason to choose an ePub reader over a Kindle is access at public libraries. Many public libraries offer books for checkout in ePub format. They use the DRM features of ePub to expire the books on the reader after a set period of time.

so e-booksellers need to make that information immediately apparent. in fact, there are entire online booksellers that don’t sell outside the EU and don’t make that clear on their homepage. (um. it’s the internet, guys.) i’m a little surprised that sony doesn’t seem to care. they could sell devices to probably every serious foreign language student and scholar in north america, on the strength of instant gratification and saved markup and shipping charges alone, if we could be sure that the license extends to us. once i am satisfied that enough of the material i’m interested in would be available to me, i’ll get more serious about agitating for amazon’s device to recognize the format — or for publishers to also supply a kindle-compatible edition for download. i frankly don’t really care which. (although like many, i do care about persistence, nobody gets to have that, yet.)

aside: geographic limitations are stupid. if – for example – australian publishers want to make money, they should find more australians to write more good books and sell them worldwide, rather than excluding u.s. publications from australia so they can publish their own editions of the latest by grisham or king or patterson. the entire english-speaking world is far bigger than australia. on the other hand, there are a significant number of germans within the german-speaking countries who don’t read at all. however, german ex-pats tend to be *hungry* for reading material in their own language, even if they never read much at home. i know i keep saying this; but publishers are stupid.

Standards are useful things, but they aren’t necessarily the best or fastest path to innovation. I’m not saying Bezos’ statement isn’t disingenuous, just observing from a long history in the tech world.

The innovation argument Bezos makes also goes both ways – as long as they have their own format they miss out on technological innovations in epub, and they also can’t influence epub and help it get better. If Amazon supported epub, they could even sell more books to people with Nooks, Sony Readers etc. In a way this reminds me of the HD DVD vs Blu-ray war, where you had two opposing formats and neither of the sides seemed to understand the advantages of having just one.

Incidently, Nook just managed hit 50% of Kindles popularity on facebook in the last hour. Although the K3 announcement meant that today was the first day in a long time that Kindle added more fans than Nook.