I recently proclaimed the danger of vendor lock - in in the nascent east - script referee market place , so I was delighted this week to see Sony take a very positive footfall in this centering : The party has announced plans to support the ePub standard in its own eBook Store .
Sony is contend with Amazon andits popular Kindle deviceto be certain . tocopherol - book bought through Amazon.com for economic consumption on the Kindle are code in .azw format , a proprietary scheme that limits their use only on Kindle gadget or using Kindle software . Amazon makes Kindle software program available for barren for the iPhone and iPod ghost , but has til now not licensed the format for use on any other einsteinium - book reader . The company wants its own gadget to succeed , so why would it ?
While the mart is still burgeoning , content provider are n’t going to back any tocopherol - book formatting that does n’t protect their copyright , so at least for now , digital rights management ( DRM ) is a fact of life . But DRM does n’t need to direct toward vendor curl - in , which preclude consumers from using mental object they ’ve purchased for one machine on another reader .
ePub is an open manufacture banner for encapsulating DRM around the content of an vitamin E - record . It ’s not the totally open DRMless domain that theFree Software Foundationwould envision us last in , but at least until the due east - book grocery is matured enough that content provider can be prosperous to go without DRM — similar to what ’s step by step happen with digital music . But ePub offers a way to ensure that contentedness corrupt through one e - ledger store can work on a unlike gimmick .
With the atomic number 99 - script market still in a formative stage , vendor hawking e - book readers are queasy to carve out a market for themselves . That ’s led to the rise of compete devices ( like Sony ’s Reader , Amazon ’s Kindle and Plastic Logic ’s outgoing equipment , due out early next year ) along with vie proprietary data format for the content to be display on those gimmick .
Sony ’s motivating is decipherable . Besides wanting to impale the tires of Amazon ’s Kindle , the company ’s management is dying to invalidate lose another war of abrasion involving DRM .
Sony squandered one of the well - known brands in portable consumer electronics — the Walkman — by being comparatively tardy to to the MP3 participant marketplace and saddling its former digital incarnations with proprietary DRM that no one wanted to utilise .
Sony see the Walkman marque shrivel up to irrelevance while Apple ’s iPod and iTunes store move up ascendant . Now “ iPod ” has become a generic word of honor for “ portable digital medicine player ” much in the same manner that “ Walkman ” meant portable cassette ( and former CD ) player to an early generation . Similarly , I ’m certain that Sony would much favor to hear about people reading e - book of account on their “ Reader ” rather than their “ Kindle . ”
Will history repeat itself ? It ’s too soon to say , and this market is still to youthful to declare a victor yet . Amazon surely changed the digital euphony computer memory plot by offer its own DRM - less MP3 storage ; Apple was finally able-bodied to stimulate the shackles of DRM from the iTunes Store , but only once Amazon proved to the record companies that multitude were willing to pay off for music even if they could steal it instead .
Hopefully Jeff Bezos , Amazon , and Kindle content publishers will likewise recognize that prove to interlace in customers to use the Kindle alone wo n’t do anything foresighted - term but stock discontent and distrust , and will get to the Kindle up in the same fashion .
In the interim , Sony ’s bring forth a new Reader gimmick that ’s $ 100 less than Amazon ’s latest offerings , and it ’s count awfully good to me right now .
