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By Evan Leibovitch

image I guess David and I aren’t going to completely see eye-to-eye on this, but I didn’t see much that was wrong — or inaccurate, for that matter — in the New York Times article on the recent Sony press release. In fact, to me it appeared to be all good news.

Upon reading the original article, my first reaction was to celebrate the effective demise of Sony’s LRF format; I still think that was the main purpose of the announcement. The Reader’s continued support of LRF always allowed the possibility that Sony could be keeping its own proprietary-format options open. Now the field of supported e-book formats is now officially smaller by one, and that can’t be a bad thing for publishers or consumers.

I understand David’s point about DRM’d ePub not being an open format, but to me it’s not quite that bad. DRM is optional in ePub, it’s a third-party feature that is bolted on, not built in. The format is still "open" in that Adobe does not have a contractual monopoly on providing copy-protection for ePub. Once the numbers rise enough other DRM methods and vendors will step forward, all — like Adobe’s — required to stay outside of the ePub core.

I certainly am on David’s side about the evils of DRM, but a benign NYT article — which helps solidify ePub’s position as the definitive Kindle-alternative format — is not the place to fight this battle. We should be cheering that DRM is optional and about all of the Project Gutenberg (and other) existing ePubs that stay away from it. Advocates should be taking the opportunity to remind the public that the standard ePub spec doesn’t allow the kind of remote-takedown scanario that recently affected many Kindle users.

To me, Adobe DRM is to ePub what Macrovision is to DVDs — a non-excludive tool that is allowed by the spec but clearly outside of it. And a DRM ePub is still ePub — it will still play on all readers that support that particular DRM, and its content is still assembled the same way as DRM-free books. All the ePub format advantages to publishers are still in play when making DRM’d documents.

If Sony wants to sell DRM’d books to Reader owners, they’re welcome to do so. Maybe the titles they sell this way would not be available at all if DRM were not available to the publisher. Here in a standards-based world, a Reader owner has the option of going to any other online bookstores and publishers that might have a different approach to DRM. In the proprietary world that level of choice simply doesn’t exist.

 
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