One important difference between the Sony Reader (with its new support of Adobe DRMed epub and PDF files) and the Kindle is how open each reader is. The Kindle is very closed system. Yes, you can get books from different publishers on the Kindle, but the hardware provider, the DRM provider, and the bookseller are all the same entity: Amazon.com. On the other hand, in the case of the Sony Reader, Sony provides the hardware, Adobe the DRM, and many individual booksellers will be selling the content.

Consumers will be much better off with no DRM at all, but if that is not possible, the second best thing is with a DRM provided by an industry owned not-for-profit organization (CrossRef is an example of an industry-owned organization, which in this case provides the ability of publishers of scholarly material to cross link their articles and books using a cross-publisher database), but if that is not possible as well, we should at at least end up with different organizations controlling different parts of the digital book system. With multiple provides for each segment if possible. With the Kindle, this is not the case. With Sony Reader, the only single player here is Adobe providing the DRM, but there can be multiple hardware providers (I am sure Adobe will be porting Adobe Digital Editions to many hardware platforms). There can be multiple bookstores, since Adobe will be releasing Adobe Content Server 4.0, which enable anyone to create a bookstore of DRMed epub ad PDF. Many publishers can release their books in epub or PDF and sell them via multiple bookstores and consumers can download these books and read them on multiple hardware platforms.

Why should you care? You should for several reasons; one of them is because of available choice to you in the future. If you buy Sony Reader today and buy 200 books worth, say, $1500 (all with Adobe DRM rather than Sony own DRM), you can move your library in the future to any other book reader if you want to (that supports Adobe DRM). This is not the case with the Kindle. If you buy books from Amazon for $1500, you are at their mercy. You can upgrade your hardware by buying a new Kindle (only from Amazon and at the price Amazon demands), but you cannot switch the hardware provider.

The second reason is that Amazon will most certainly try to squeeze the maximum possible revenue from all the books they sell. This simply means they will keep raising their publisher discount (their commission for selling the books) until a reasonable number of publishers walk away (why wouldn’t they ask for 90% of the revenue if not that many publishers are willing to walk away?). By necessity, they will end up with partial content, and Kindle owners will not have universal access to everything digitally published (I know this is pretty hypothetical now that only a small fraction of books are in digital format). One can argue Adobe will be in the same position as Amazon with their DRM solution, but Adobe is in a much weaker position to exploit their market power, because they control only a small (albeit important) part of the value chain. Adobe also made a number of decisions that I find comforting (both as a consumer and as a publisher), including their pricing model for Adobe Content Server 4.0 (which will be a small upfront cost plus a fixed fee per book sold rather than a percentage of the publisher revenue).

I hope that Adobe will be porting Adobe Digital Editions to more devices soon, so the argument of consumers being able to choose between different hardware providers can manifest itself. There is not reason (or financial incentive) for Adobe not to port ADE to the iphone, other cell phones, and to as many book readers as possible. Their interest is to make ADE available on as many devices as possible, since they don’t make their money selling these devices anyway.

However, we probably should wait ’till October to see if the rumors about a new Kindle are correct.

By the way, the process was so easy and simple that it may have an unintended result – making me pine away for a Kindle. The ability to just suck down whatever you want to read, wherever you are, is enticing. I love my Sony Reader, but …….