Kindle failure would mean biz failure of obnoxious DRM lockups, Evan—not E-BOOK failure
Evan Schnittman, a VP at Oxford University Press, is a nice, smart guy clueful about a lot of things. In the wake of a recent blog posting of his, I hope he’ll rethink matters and take care not to say that e-books will be DOA if the Kindle flops. Best not to confuse DRMed e-book reading with e-reading, period.
Perhaps Evan can scoot on over to Publishers Weekly and see what Bethann Patrick’s e-book-hip readers are saying about the Kindle’s e-babel and DRM. Great to see the readable Bethann excited about E, of course. I hope that both she and Evan will check out my latest PW post—on the Kindle—which I’ll reproduce here in a moment.
What Evan’s company doing right: Allowing ad-supported, nonDRMed books to go on Wowio with the owners’ names embed—social DRM, in other words. SDRM is what Amazon should be using if it is worried about piracy. Traditional DRM really is more about protection of certain tech companies’ business models–Amazon’s, for example—than protection of books. Notice? Jeff Bezos offers nonDRMed music at Amazon. So why can’t he do the same for books, relying on social DRM instead if need be? Could it be that Jeff’s more interested in turning a buck off DRM and his Kindle format—very possibly just Mobipocket with a new file extension and fresh PID numbers—than in being consistent? Mobi itself would work just fine with SDRM.
Related: An E-Book Reader That May Just Catch On, by David Pogue in the New York Times.
Technorati Tags: Evan Schnittman , Amazon , Jeff Bezos , Oxford University Press
November 22nd, 2007 at 10:48 am
[...] I had a go at in my last Kindle post about the failure of Kindle meaning the failure of e-books: Kindle failure would mean biz failure of obnoxious DRM lockups, Evan—not E-BOOK failure.Oh, and there is also a Wikipedia page already! But of course there is.And if Amazon is [...]
November 23rd, 2007 at 2:25 am
[...] Kindle failure would mean biz failure of obnoxious DRM lockups, Evan—not E-BOOK failure | TeleRead… “SDRM is what Amazon should be using if it is worried about piracy.” (tags: DRM Amazon kindle ebooks publishing rights openness) [...]