Can we really say they are helping the situation when their licensing costs are so high that they are prohibitive to device manufacturers and publishers? Isn’t the eReader technonology free and doens’t it pre-date ADEPT?

I also think that Adobe is helping the industry quite a bit, but I’m not certain that creating yet another DRM solution with high licensing costs was in anyone’s interest except Adobe.

No it isn’t. It is a leading “America” solution. The “industry” is a world-wide collective of readers from hundreds of countries all of whom have managed to develop an e-reading base in spite of Amazon stubbornly refusing to service them. Amazon will NEVER be an ‘industry’ leader until they open up to the world.

Yes, there is an intersection point where well designed, well supported DRM might be more attractive to employ when the decision is on the bubble. Perhaps that is why DRM-free content advocates often are not very excited about the discussion of what makes for “good” DRM and sometimes take the tact that “the only good DRM is a dead DRM”.

But when it is required can’t it be better? That is what Adobe is trying to do IMHO. Dont’ get me wrong, lots of room for improvement there for sure. However, any device manufacturer can license the technology, any publisher or digital services company can license the encryption server, and any store can sell the content. That is a decent start.

For the record I think Mr. Bezos is one of the great visionaries of our time and the Kindle is surely an industry leading device/service. Now, if it only had the Reader Mobile SDK on it so I could check out library books and read DRMd EPUBs that I already bought elsewhere to read on my Sony Reader, and if I could read any content purchased from Amazon on my hardware/software of choice, I’d buy the DX in a heartbeat.

Me, I refuse to be herded anywhere, so I keep an open mind as to who is my friend and who is here “to serve man”.

More importantly; you folks are focusing on hardware as the lock-in.

May I suggest considering the isolationast aspects of committing to a fenced-in ecosystem? Any choice of platform is by definition a rejection of the alternatives. Unless you choose not to choose.

Defacto market standards are the result of the choices people make and they can fence you in no matter what.

For the rest:

Of course, Janes and the tech manuals are different from consumer stuff. That is the whole point of the argument; there is a lot more to ebooks and publishing than the NYT best sellers or the latest Honor Harrington Novel (which is great fun).
But letting one market define the rules for another is a prescription for major failure.
Even in consumer fiction there are different customer behaviors associated with different genres and even in the same genre you get different behaviors. Some of us like to collect our books and reread them, others read a book and toss it or trade it in or give it away. No revisiting. And different people have different ethos; some of us prefer to buy our content, whether in print or electronic form, while others have been conditioned by the Napster or torrent-ization of electronic content to only pay for what is not found “free” in the depths of the net.
When facing an emerging business where the financial rules aren’t clear, relying solely on the good will and honor of the masses is risky behavior.
Baen chooses to take that risk; I applaude them for it.
Random House doesn’t.
I will not condemn them for it without actual evidence they purposefully intend to screw customers.

It is early in the life of the industry.
Many other industries have come to regret rash choices made early in their history that turned out to have distorted their development.

Just one example from the PC business–the domination of Lotus-compatibility over MS-DOS compatibility in the early 80’s–serves to illustrate how short-term considerations have long-term lock-in effects. (Do 21st century PCs *really* need to be able to boot up Dos 2.1? Yet all can. And there is a price we all pay in functionality lost to this day.) The tyranny of the installed base is as much a form of lock-in as any DRM scheme ever concocted.

Lock-in takes many forms, not all are immediately obvious. Long-term thinking is required to avoid being short-term wise and long term foolish.

Hence, caution in one’s (technological) passions is required. Or, as Hypocrates said: “First, do no harm.” Me, I’d say, don’t burn bridges before you get to them, you might need them to escape the forest fire hidden beyond the ridge.

Public libraries and companies like Baen represent the evidence that there are other business models besides the “1-person-1-sale” commercial model, potentially more besides, all of which should be closely examined to find the best model to pay producers and supply consumers.

Like Rob and David, I produce in multiple formats. Put simply, it’s a ridiculous time-waster, and the exact opposite of the way the market ought to work. It’s the equivalent of needing to format every television show for different brands of TVs… instead of allowing the TV to adjust the signal for optimized viewing on its screen. The sooner we are rid of backwards practices, the better.

Even if the format isn’t ePub… even if it is not perfect… just so long as there’s only one.

Or, reader abusing scumsuckers, if you like.

Everything has lock-in? Only in the sense you need electronics to use it.

Nothing stopping anyone using amiga/unix/mac/linux/windows/vax/ibm or whatever created text files or html anywhere else, is there? Commodore 64 if you like, too, speaking of the 80s.

Pretty sure this discussion is about standard consumer-level retail product, not high-priced industry analysis reports.

However, your argument has a big hole. There are large numbers of journals etc. that are very expensive. I have access to huge numbers of them, DRM-free. Password-protected and subscription-based whether personally, or by organisation, sure, but html, pdf, and doc files abound.

I don’t think Janes is orders of magnitude more expensive than scientific journals, is it?

Your average consumer can’t afford these of course, much like the publication you mentioned. They can get them via their libraries though. That will of course vary from place to place.

Non-fiction periodical databases and libraries are different to buying the latest Bujold or Travel Guide, certainly.

It is way too early in the evolution of ebooks and ebook markets (note the plural) for *anybody* to pretend they know anything with absolute certainty.

Me, all I know is that ramping up new products and technologies requires making a decent profit at every step of the way in the ramp up. (Look at the rampup approach at Tesla Motors; a classic by the book approach. Might not work, but that’s how you do it.) And that the mature ebook industry of 2020 is not going to look anything like the industry of 2010.

My inclination is to let things play out for a while before I brand anybody a greedy monopolistic villain or any particular approach or technology a clearcut positive for the consumer.

One thing I do know with a certainty, though; corporations exist to make money. Some are more consumer hostile than others but none is your friend. And when a corporation presents itself as my “friend” and claims they are looking out for my long-term interest, that’s when I put a padlock on my wallet.

As somebody who’s lived through the workstation wars of the 80’s and 90’s, I also know there is no such thing as an open system.
Zero.
Zilch.
None.

*Everything* has lock-in of one sort or another.
Caveat emptor, folks!

I don’t think this means we should stop pushing vendors to support ePub because moving toward our ideal makes life better. What we all want is what you say, Paul–to be able to read great books on whatever platform we’re currently using.

I agree with David about the hassle of multiple formats. I support seven formats and every time I publish a book, I end up spending hours tweaking formats to get a look that works.

Rob Preece
BooksForABuck

If DRM went away, the industry would only benefit from selecting one unifying, common format for all to use (and for all devices to translate into their on-board display format of choice). ePub would be an ideal format for that (or about as ideal as we have, currently… or some other HTML-based format of the future). The industry would then be ready to develop according to a free market system.

Creating a unified format was the most important building block of the digital music industry. Removing DRM cemented it down.

I don’t think a cross plataform DRM will make things better for people. It’s a lazy solution – give up a free DRM market, a real cross plataform solution, because you have Amazon on Kindle and iPhone, and that looks fancy and nice.

Publishers wont drop DRM? Yes, they will. People can’t get fooled for so long. I can just think of music market / mp3 / when i read opinions like this.

So, epub is indeed quite relevant to the customers if they want to spend the 20-some seconds to get a DRM-free file … and get all the freedom you’re perceiving years ahead.