Get Kindle format books by trading in Adobe titles? Or Mobi or others?
Believe it or not, that’s the idea of a Gather member, a new Kindle user, who at the same time denies he has a huge problem with DRM/eBabel. A little confusing. That said, I wonder if Amazon could actually apply the trade-in concept as a compromise for owners of DRMed Mobi books, which the Kindle disses officially, despite the famous hack. No, this wouldn’t be the best solution. But perhaps it could be an interim one while we’re waiting for Amazon to wise up on .epub.
Here’s what X Tabber wrote on Gather: “I have a number of eBooks in that Adobe DRM format. I would love to be able to translate these into the Kindle format replacing my Adobe formatted versions.
From a ‘rights’ perspective, I think this is a fair proposition—you can own the book in whatever format you choose, but not all of them at the same time (unless you see some utility in owning the LP, the cassette tape, the 8-Track and the CD of every album). Particularly for the e versions of a book, once the book has been digitized, the only incremental cost is delivery to the purchaser. If you own the eBook version, why not let me trade it for the Kindle version? I’ll let Amazon work that one out.”
Little detail: Amazon doesn’t control Adobe’s DRM, and that could create problems. But guess what. Amazon and retail partners do control Mobi’s DRM, especially in the case of customers who bought from the Mobipocket store. Meanwhile what about trade-ins for eReader files? Whoops. Some interesting business issues could also arise. The possibilities reel the mind. And that, of course, is precisely the trouble with DRM/eBabel. Here’s to simplicity!
December 31st, 2007 at 1:00 am
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