Moderator's note: Adobe will ideally discover the joys of social DRM---talked up by the company's own Bill McCoy---rather than simply going with the traditional variety alone. Meanwhile, with just slight editing, here's news about Content Server 4, posted for TeleBlog readers who like the usual DRM. CS4 includes some wrinkles of special interest to libraries. And that should help spread around ePub, not just the usual PDF. - D.R. Leading Publishers and Distributors Secure Digital Content With New Adobe Content Server 4 SAN JOSE, Calif. — Sept. 9, 2008 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today...

So what else would you expect from EFF? Well, for one thing, I'd welcome EFF taking an interest in ePub development and encouraging a good mix of players so that no one company can dominate. EFF's advocacy of social DRM as an alternative to the usual kind---a compromise, even though the best "protection" is none---would also help.  No, we're not talking about encryption here. Social DRM is hardly without flaws, but would still be a nice, gentle way of reminding the users of both their rights and the creators'. I can even see social DRM...

David Pogue, the New York Times tech columnist who has worried that E means piracy, will be participating in a laudable O'Reilly experiment involving nonDRMed PDF, Mobipocket and ePub. The Pogue book served up this way will be Windows Vista: The Missing Manual. And significantly, he's "encouraging O'Reilly to adopt some antipiracy steps, like adding a footer at the bottom of each page that says, 'This edition specially prepared for bgates@microsoft.com (or whatever your e-mail address is). That might deter people from posting their copies online for all to download.' Wow. Sounds like social DRM. Nice...

Is it time for the Brits to re-colonize the United States? Absoutely! Bring 'em back, Redcoats and all. Some of the wisest utterances on topics like DRM and colliding e-book formats are coming from the British publishing community. A gutsy PW equivalent in the U.K.---far braver and smarter than the wimpy Yankee variety, which zapped my anti-DRM, anti-eBabel blog---has just published a memorable article on the very problems that so many American book people are sweeping under the carpet. In eBabel on and on, The Bookseller explains the mess in terms that even the...

Mobipocket Desktop 6.2 isn't just importing the IDPF's ePub format---it's now able to recognize it automatically to convert it for reading in Mobi. Yes, Mobipocket would do well to render ePub natively without translation. But auto-convert is still a nice step forward despite shortcomings, and I hope that Amazon will consider the same capabilities for its Kindle device, which can read nonDRMed Mobi. An iPhone reader is among the new versions of Mobi that will be available later this year. Nice going! Oh, how there's more to life than PDF! On top of everything else, at least some...

Moderator's note: Nice going, Joe! Keep us posted on this social DRM experiment. May Wiley extend it to full-length books from all its imprints! - D.R. There have been countless times over the past several years when customers have asked us, "Hey, how come I have to buy the entire book when all I really want are these 3 chapters?"  This is a pretty popular question when you're standing in the WROX booth at a developer's conference, for example.  Well, I'm happy to say that we now have a product for that situation and it's called Chapters on Demand. The...