My thoughts about serious e-book lovers (at least serious about the tech) are based on hundreds of comments that readers have submitted to TeleRead over the years. DRM easily remains the The Topic here, or one of them. As a group people here do indeed want to own books for real or as close to it as they can come.

As for ePub, didn’t the major publishers agree to it via IDPF, and aren’t they actually starting to implement it at least as a distribution mechanism and in some cases more? ePub will even be the core of the forthcoming version of eReader software.

The Amazon DTP issue? I can’t wait for your writings on that topic. Tips especially cherished—including on the issue of making sure that, depending on publishes’ preference, books will or won’t be DRMed.

Thanks,
David

I certainly didn’t mean to advise “readers and writers to take it on faith that Amazon will, sometime, somehow, make it all right regarding DRM.” People should advocate and organize aggressively for the issues they care about, as I have been doing for the past 35 years, most recently on text-to-speech.

The only advice I would give is something that I learned in many years as a community organizer: when you want someone in a position of power to do something, it is essential to envision a strategy that is built around that player’s self-interest (unless you have a chance to actually take power). That was my underlying point about Apple’s movement on DRM issues. My observation that Bezos may have a nuanced understanding of DRM and related open-content and big-tent issues, based on years of watching Amazon’s practices, is not intended to imply that Amazon will do the right thing because it is the right thing. I think it more likely that Amazon, once it achieves a certain level of hegemony on this e-book terrain, will begin moving away from DRM because it will ultimately be more profitable to do so.

But maybe they won’t. Meanwhile, I submit that it is important for those who are committed to the anti-DRM fight to realize that the fight does not become a campaign until it has three elements: (1) a clear-eyed sense of the relative support that exists on each side of the question, where it comes from, and the extent to which consumers care or don’t care; (2) total intellectual honesty about the current state of play — for instance, it seems to me that assertions that ePub is the e-book publishing “standard” or that “serious e-book-lovers hate DRM” declare victories that have yet to be won; and (3) the self-interest strategy noted above.

All that being said, I’m sure that I am too easy on Amazon on some things and too hard on them on others. But I always try to avoid those rose-colored specs, just as I always try to take a good hard look at my own objectivity when I feel moved to charge someone else with bias.

The “fairness doctrine” may have gone by the wayside, and rightly so, but it’s still nice to have a variety of opinions. If nothing else, it gives the rest of us something to complain about.

Anyway, given the first two of the last three paragraphs, I don’t think we can completely accuse Stephen of viewing the Kindle through rose-colored glasses.

All modesty aside, now.

Your piece advises readers and writers to take it on faith that Amazon will, sometime, somehow, make it all right regarding DRM.

Isn’t a fond eye on the company store to be expected from the author of The Complete User’s Guide To the Amazing Amazon Kindle 2?