It’s not Sony or Amazon—it’s the server that counts
By Paul Biba
That’s what Martyn Daniels is saying in a post on his Brave New World blog that lauds the ABA for its digital book move. Here is an excerpt.
It is useful to look at the market from the back end view, not just from the point of view of the consumer:
So we are now seeing a significant shift with the major opposition to Amazon not being Sony, iRex, Cooler, Plastic Logic, BeBook but the file server that joins them together – Adobe’s ACS4.How will resellers react to the opportunity that now clearly enables them to participate? Will consumer buy local or from the chain, or from the aggregators? Will publishers commercially enable the current channel to fully participate, or back the ‘stack them high and sell them cheap’ merchants?
Today it is hard to envisage an alternative to ACS4 and once it’s SDK option is taken up by mobile players, we will start to see a level of interoperability sought by many. This is a bold step by the ABA and as long as we steer clear of the false repository wars, we may now see a significant digital step change that is makes it possible for all to partisipate.
August 26th, 2009 at 9:48 am
So who owns the books you pay for on those readers? The publisher, the seller, or Adobe?
Whomever it is, it’s still not the buyer.