I'm awaiting the canned version of E-Bookworm's interview with Content Reserve/OverDrive founder Steve Potash--a business commitment prevented me from hearing it in real time. But meanwhile let's enjoy a few tidbits on Content Reserve and Microsoft from a Digital ID World get-together, via Akma's Random Thoughts:

...Steve acknowledged that eBooks have in the past exercised a hyperbolic control over the buyers’ uses of their purchases, and indicated his expectation that the market would even out the speed bumps and potholes. [Marco DeMello] defended Microsoft’s track record; it has made mistakes, but it’s really on the side of consumers.

"Red Beard," a pseudonym for a European expat in Brazil, follows up below on an earlier item where he discussed e-book software used by the country's national library. He believes that a true TeleReaderish approach, offering not just knowledge for the masses but also the proper tools to access it, could be a welcome alternative to the present. Look at the academic-technical book to the left. It sells for $120.95US via Amazon--fifty percent more than the monthly minimum wages in Rio. A locally bootlegged edition has cost $22US.

After a few years living in the San Francisco Bay Area, I am again back in Brazil. This is the country where my children get the best private education available locally, so I am familiar with the text-book, p-book and library scenes. Digital books, whether CD/DVD or download flavor, are pretty much unknown here. And yet the potential demand is immense. Here are some background facts to chew on, from O GLOBO, the leading Rio newspaper:

Population estimate: 176 million (2000 census was 169 million). Literacy is close to one hundred per cent, a huge leap forward over the past thirty years.

Internet access: Home users 14.7m, of whom close to one million have broadband ADSL or cable modem access; non-domestic work, schools, kiosks, public sector access are another 11.3m users for a total 26m.

Socio-economic Web usage, divided into five classes A thru E based on monthly earnings:

Classes A & B (wealthiest & upper-middle class) account for 91 percent of all daily Web access; Classes C& D (lower-middle class & employed working poor), 75 percent of the population, represent balance 9 percent of daily Web access and their Web usage is doubling annually as they become computer-literate.

Brazilians are innovative and info-hungry. Perhaps this explains why they access the Web on average 16 times a month, compared to Spain's average user's 13 times and Germany's 14 times, despite home users paying hefty by-the-minute local telephone toll charges for predominantly dial-up access. Further, their average Web access lasts for 38 minutes, compared to Japan's 33 minutes--Japan ranks second in this average length-of-connection world comparison. Remember, Brazilians' average family take-home pay is about one tenth of that of families living in the top thirty economies of the world (source OECD).

Police raided the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) sprawling campus located close to Rio de Janeiro's international airport yesterday morning and carried away more than 2,000 copies of illegally photocopied textbooks. The stash was found in two photocopier stores located inside an Engineering Faculty building where photocopied versions of books had been on sale for two months. Both photocopier store operators were charged with violating copyright laws.

Texts included academic books published in the local language, Brazilian Portuguese, as well as in English, and were displayed on the stores' shelves like books. The price for a photocopied version of Population Balances from Academic Press was [US$22.00].

Rio's anti-piracy police squad was tipped off by a Brazilian association comprising the thirty largest publishers and leading authors in this South American nation of 176 million people. This national association claims illegal photocopying of books, or book piracy, is hurting book sales.

Discussing the Public Library of Science, I not-so-fondly recalled the "efficient" days when CompuServe, AOL and the rest inflicted minute-by-minute charges on plebes without Net access--and did what they could to prolong customers' time online. That was eons ago in the States, but not, alas, in the U.K., as Dan Jackson reminds us:

It occurred to me to wonder if you knew that the situation in the UK was in fact exactly that (i.e. Internet access charged by the minute) right up until the year 2000, which was when flat rate dialup Internet access finally became available over here. Broadband did not emerge until 2001!

Microsoft Chief Software Architect Bill Gates has yet to fess up and admit that "Winston Smith" is right about the destructive effect of onerous Digital Rights Management on both our freedom and the e-book industry. But maybe someone else's sage advice will help. In an article in Library Journal, Walter Minkel, Technology editor of School Library Journal, smartly zeros in on price, the Tower of eBabel and copy restrictions as major obstacles to e-bookdom's success with books for children. Example:

Take Princess in Love, for example. It's the third volume in Meg Cabot's popular "Princess Diaries" series. It costs $12.95 from Amazon—more than Amazon sells the hardcover copy ($11.19) for—and is available only in Microsoft Reader format, which means it is readable only on Pocket PCs that use Microsoft's Pocket PC operating system. To top it off, it cannot be printed. [Psst! If you look beyond Amazon, you can download Princess in Love for $5.35 right now at PalmDigitalMedia--in fact, for just $4.81 if you're a PDM subscriber. Still, Minkel's point is well taken! - DR.]

Many of the titles that kids want are too expensive. With printing limited and the whole issue of accessibility on different devices so complicated, most people have thrown up their hands and stuck with web sites, video programs, and print books. The only bright spot seems to be in the pre-K to third grade arena."

Publishers' fear of piracy--their terror at the idea of teens using a "Bookster" to download freely the Harry Potter series--has ironically limited the interest of the book-buying public. The Association of American Publishers and the American Library Association admitted as much in their March 2003 white paper "What Consumers Want in Digital Rights Management." F. Hill Lowinski wrote, "[Digital rights management] technologies need to allow flexible use of content so that the user experience is not frustrating." The report concludes that publishers need to lighten up if they want e-books to succeed—but there's no sign of that happening yet.

(Jerry Justianto at TeleRead's partner site Pocket PC eBook Watch contributed the item below. I urge visiting Slashdotters to check out his newsy Web log. - David Rothman.)

From Missing the Point on anti-piracy technology in the Boston Globe--speculating why flaws in protection tech can exist:

Here's a clue. Both SunnComm and the record company BMG, which uses the SunnComm system, told the Globe that Halderman's discovery [using Shi**t key on loading the CD to the computer bypass the protection] wasn't news to them. Both firms were well aware that their antipiracy system could easily be bypassed. SunnComm president Bill Whitmore said they were angry at Halderman for describing their product as "irreparably flawed." In reality, said Whitmore, MediaMax does exactly what it was designed to do.

It sounds like doublespeak. A system that's supposed to stop people from making illegal music files can easily be bypassed, allowing the user to make all the copies he wants--yet it still works? That's utterly goofy.

Or is it? A similar system seems to work just fine for the company that's sold more music over the Internet than anybody else--Apple Computer Inc.

In short, the antipiracy features in iTunes are nearly as easy to bypass as SunnComm's. Yet nobody's calling iTunes "irreparably flawed." As a matter of fact, other music-selling sites on the Internet have adopted a similar approach--building some security into the download, but letting users burn the files onto "insecure" music CDs. Are they all run by idiots?

The latest New York Times story tells all. By the way TeleRead got only one reply to our informal poll asking e-publishers and e-stores for their thoughts on the act. Sad. Perhaps certain people for the moment are just plain resigned to this Big Brotherdom.

One related reason for lack of interest in the poll: On the eBook Community list, at least one e-book-seller noted that he himself could protect privacy only so much, because of the credit card angle.

Would that the DMCA be the only threat to our Constitutional rights! From the Times:

For some consumers, it has meant fewer online purchases of politically incorrect books. For the Web sites, it has meant changes to privacy policies and marketing strategies, among other things.

Dan Jackson, through whose Web site you can download a crack to defeat the user-hostile copy "protection" of the Microsoft Reader, did hear from a few of the people he hoped to. They offered new homes for the dangerous Convert Lit program beyond the reach of DMCAish laws.

Let's hope that he and Convert Lit programmer "Winston Smith" already have a solution, but you never know--so e-mail Dan if you can help. Meanwhile, for benefit of Chief Software Architect Bill Gates and Microsoft business strategist Maggie Wilderotter, here are excerpts from some of my favorite Slashdot postings:

Anonymous: "Big corporations miss the big picture. Incompatible formats, locked in proprietary nonsense--these are the things that can kill good products. I own a Rocket Book e-reader. It's great. Except for the fact that it can only use one proprietary format. Which, thankfully, after the company took a dive, they released the authoring tools for that format. Unfortunately, getting content like PDF's and .LIT's into that format is a bitch. Without this tool (and Skylarov's), the content that I wish to pay for is useless to me. Ironic, as the content is just the printed word. These companies all believe that DRM is somehow a feature (isn't it great, our customers can only buy content from us!) and use the DMCA in this area to create a natural monopoly. But, of course, people don't like being bullied around."

Matchlight: "The first time I tried to do a little offline, off-computer reading I realized that there was no print function. I didn't want to copy the whole thing or print it out for distribution. All I wanted to do is print off a chapter so I could hop in the car and read a little during my 5 hour drive during a weekend visit. The people making anti-piracy software have to realize that you just can't force people to act in a simple fashion so that it's easier for them. They have to realize that they have to find real and intelligent solutions that work and still allow Joe Legal user fair and useful access to the content that's being provided."

James Lewis: "Have you ever tried to get a LIT file to work on your pocketPC? I don't know about you, but I have had huge problems getting ebooks I bought and paid for to "activate" on my Pocket PC. I've spent many hours trying to get my books to work, and after finding CLIT all the pain of .LIT files has gone away."

Exp(pi*sqrt: "Palm's PalmReader format...took about a day to crack and I have only a tiny bit of experience with cracking (last thing I cracked before that was the version of Lotus 1-2-3 that insisted you had the original floppy - so we're talking mid-eighties or so). I assume that the engineers who design these security systems know exactly what they are doing: pretending to make something secure so that they can con gullible companies into giving them a paycheck."