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By Chris Meadows

Both Paul and David have posted their opinions on the ePub standard and on cross-platform DRM today, so I might as well post my own incoherent ramblings. (I’m half-zoned on Percocet right now due to having gotten two new pins put into my leg yesterday, so I hope they make sense.)

Amazon & ePub

Paul makes some good points in his post. I think e-book fans tend to forget that, from the outside, e-books are a confusing mess. We take our own expertise for granted—but the average consumer might think that ePub is a place where you go to get an e-beer.

Why is it that we want an open standard to be adopted? To reduce the Tower of eBabel problem, naturally. We’re thinking of the market as a whole. But to Amazon, and to most Kindle users, that Tower might just as well not exist.

One of Amazon’s greatest accomplishments with the Kindle is that it insulates consumers from the format muddle. Since Amazon provides the books and the reader, all a consumer has to know is to click the “buy this for my Kindle” option. As far as simplicity goes, that’s a real winner.

Sure, Kindle-users are locked into Amazon as their one and only (DRM’d) e-book provider—but then again, Amazon has the biggest catalog and (at the moment) better prices than most other e-book vendors. Kindle-users may not even be able to see the shackles.

Of course, Amazon has no interest in opening its platform to the books sold by other stores. That’s why it embraced and extended the Mobipocket format so that the Kindle is incompatible with Mobi DRM. (Sure, you can put unencrypted third-party content on there, but that was probably just because Amazon knew people would want to upload their own documents—any support for other stores’ unencrypted products is purely coincidental.)

This ensures Amazon gets all of its customers’ e-book-buying business—but it also keeps things simple for the consumer. Never underestimate the average consumer’s inability to understand instructions that the rest of us might think are perfectly simple. In my experience providing technical support (both for ISP customers, and for my parents), I have learned that otherwise perfectly intelligent people will nonetheless muff up any computer-related procedure more complicated than “click here to buy the book.”

From that point of view, what would be the benefit to Amazon of adding ePub? Amazon already has what it wants: its own format, its own e-book store, its own consumer lock-in. On the other hand, it did just buy the makers of Stanza, one of the best-known ePub readers for any platform. One wonders why Amazon did it if it had no interest in ePub at all.

But if Amazon did add ePub to the Kindle, what DRM format would it use with it? The Stanza-licensed eReader DRM? The DRM used by Adobe? Amazon’s own incompatible Kindle DRM?

Cross-Platform DRM

DRM isn’t going away. The iTunes music store dropped it, but the e-book industry seems bound and determined not to learn from the music industry’s lessons. Publishers clutch at DRM like a drowning man at a life-preserver, and it’s going to take some time to convince them to let go of it.

I will happily stipulate to all the DRM drawbacks that David enumerates in his post—but the fact is, publishers don’t care about those. All they want is the appearance that people can’t rip off their books. Most of the e-book stores out there insist on it, too.

So for now, the question of cross-platform DRM becomes a matter of letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. If we’re going to have to have DRM—and, until the publishers and e-book stores come to their senses, we are—it should be the kind that lets us read books on as many platforms as possible.

So far, the best-of-breed multiplatform DRM is that used by Fictionwise’s eReader. eReader’s only restriction is requiring the credit card number of purchase, and does not limit the number of devices a book can occupy so long as the proper number is provided. It is available for over a dozen different platforms already, and will soon be adding more.

However, neither the Kindle nor the Sony e-ink tablets support this format. (The Astak Mentor e-ink reader was supposed to read eReader, but it never seems to have materialized.) On the other hand, Amazon now owns Lexcycle, who licensed the format for use in Stanza—but Amazon adding support for eReader DRM to the Kindle seems about as likely as Bill Gates using an iPod.

Amazon: Doing Everything Right?

Meanwhile, Amazon is starting its own multiplatform solution with its iPhone Kindle reader app, and has pledged to come out with Kindle apps for other platforms. It will probably use Lexcycle’s reader-app expertise to make the iPhone app (and other platform apps) even better.

As Paul points out, this multiplatform solution makes reading on the Kindle more convenient than ever. I hate to say it, but if Amazon wants to push its Kindle without respect to the rest of the e-book market, it’s doing everything right.

When you get right down to it, Amazon is a business, out to make the best profit it can. It is not required to care about the well-being of its competitors. It’s the same for any business in the e-book market; it’s just that Amazon is so much bigger than all the others that it has a serious competitive advantage.

Government intervention at this stage seems unlikely—as others have pointed out, there is still plenty of room for some other company to enter the fray and outcompete Amazon. For example, if Barnes & Noble were to come out with its own reading tablet using the eReader format which it now owns through owning Fictionwise, B&N might be able to compete with Amazon on the same level.

I’m starting to suspect that, like it or not, we’re entering a new era of the e-book industry, with large companies buying out smaller e-book firms. The e-book market has matured enough that big business is starting to take an interest—and individual consumers are so much smaller by comparison.

Conclusion

In conclusion, much as we might like it to, there’s no reason Amazon should adopt ePub—and even if it did, no reason its DRM should be compatible with any of the other DRMs being developed for ePub. Amazon simply doesn’t need it right now, and from its point of view enabling more interoperability with other e-bookstores would be counterproductive. The nature of big business is to keep every competitive advantage it can, and that includes consumer lock-in.

DRM is going to be with us for a while no matter what we do, because it’s the publishers who insist upon it. In that light, we might as well try to agitate for cross-platform DRM. By moving toward a multi-platform solution, Amazon is making the Kindle more and more attractive to readers—whether the rest of us like it or not.

 
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