Shane Richmond, Head of Technology (Editorial) for Telegraph Media Group, has an editorial in the Telegraph about the way that DRM breaks up even the same file format of e-books into a Tower of e-Babel. He tried to open Adobe-DRM EPUB files in iBooks and of course was told that wouldn’t work. Richmond writes: Can we pause for a moment to remind ourselves just how absurd this situation is? It’s been a problem for so long that sometimes it’s easy to take it for granted but we are being sold products that work...

Publishing Perspectives has an interesting article on the fragmented e-book situation in France. To English-speaking e-book fans, of course, fragmentation is nothing new; there has not been a single cohesive format for e-books since they first gained popularity back in the 1990s. In France, a similar situation has arisen: each publisher is releasing books on its own distribution platform. A report commissioned by France’s Culture Minister proposes that a single platform be created for the distribution of e-books. However, French publishers reacted to this about as well as you might expect Apple, Amazon, and Google would...

Gizmodo has a great article by Matt Buchanan laying out the “Tower of E-Babel” problem: different readers have their own different, restricted file format ecosystems. There is not a lot new to long-time TeleRead readers, but it would be great to show anyone just getting into e-books, or thinking about it. The article starts with a Steve Jobs quote about Apple using the EPUB format because of its “openness,” and proceeds to fill in what he is not saying: “open” or not, DRM-locked iBooks books will not be readable on other DRM’d EPUB capable readers, nor vice versa....

TechDirt and BoingBoing link to public interest group Public Knowledge’s proposed copyright reform legislation. The proposal has five key goals: strengthen fair use, including reforming outrageously high statutory damages, which deter innovation and creativity; reform the DMCA to permit circumvention of digital locks for lawful purposes; update the limitations and exceptions to copyright protection to better conform with how digital technologies work; provide recourse for people and companies who are recklessly accused of copyright infringement and who are recklessly sent improper DMCA take-down notices; and ...

Troy Wolverton of the Silicon Valley Mercury News has a great column looking at the “Tower of e-Babel” problem of myriad incompatible e-book formats, and how Apple’s iBooks may be set to make it worse. Until recently, Wolverton notes, everyone except Amazon was standardizing on EPUB, putting pressure on Amazon to come into line with them. However, since iBooks uses an entirely different form of DRM than the standard EPUB version, this means it will not be cross-compatible with the DRM everybody else uses. Apple has already shown great ability to sell digital content...

I conducted an interview with Pablo Defendini, Producer and blogger for Tor.com, via Google Wave. Our conversation ranged from the Tor.com blog itself, to the free e-book giveaway that kicked off the site, to the much-anticipated but still-absent Tor.com e-book store. Defendini noted that Tor.com was a separate subsidiary from Tor Books the publisher, and as an employee of Tor.com he was unable to answer questions pertaining to Tor Books’s stance on e-books or its e-book ventures prior to Tor.com (such as Tor Webscriptions). However, he did have a number of fascinating things to say about...