Photo Note:

I’ve had more time to play around with the Astak, and the bloom is off the rose. Yes, the e-ink screen is truly amazing, and far clearer than the touch-sensitive Sony reader’s. However, it has certain other problems.

In Praise of Astak

Before I start talking about the Astak’s shortcomings, I should mention that the company itself has some astoundingly good customer service. For one thing, they monitor the Astak forums on MobileRead and pop up to answer questions.

Whenever I have posted a technical question on the forum, I have almost immediately been emailed by an Astak representative with suggestions and offers of advice. Now, granted, I do not know whether this is their default behavior toward all users, or just because they know I’m reviewing their product. I’d like to think the former is true.

Another nice thing about the device itself is that the firmware is remarkably easy to upgrade. Just put the firmware file on an SD card, slide the card in, and reboot into upgrade mode using a combination of keypresses.

My only complaint in this regard is that the instructions I found for upgrading on their website were not entirely clear. One of the buttons to be pressed is mentioned as the “increase volume key”. I assumed that meant the rocker switch on the right—but after that did not work and I searched some more, I learned that those instructions only applied to the 6” Astak reader devices; for the 5”, you press the page-forward button left of the screen instead. Just a little confusing.

Now let’s talk about some of those shortcomings.

Battery Life

One of the things that makes e-ink so great is that it only uses power when you turn the page. The e-ink page uses micro-capsules that are rotated by current, but require no current to stay set as they are. This is why e-ink readers have such a long battery life.

This should mean that, theoretically, an e-ink reader should use almost no power at all when it is “idling”. I should be able to leave it “open,” like a book, for days on end and pick it up with the same battery level that I left off.

(Granted, there may need to be some minor power consumption—but since it is not driving a display, surely it should use less than a digital watch, which is able to run for months on a single tiny battery.)

Unfortunately, this is not the case with the Astak. If I leave it alone for several days and forget to plug it in, the battery drains completely dry—and requires approximately “overnight” to charge back up to full again. This puts a damper on what ought to be one of an e-ink reader’s biggest advantages.

A Peeling Reader

I also noticed that my sample has started to develop a flaw remarked upon by other Astak users: the peeling paint problem. About half of Astak owners have found that, with a little wear, the paint covering their reader starts to peel off. Here you can see it starting on mine, right around the left page-turn arrows. (You may need to click to enlarge it to see more clearly.)

It is only a cosmetic problem, of course, and Astak’s excellent customer service again comes to the fore: they will, on request, provide replacement units that do not suffer from this flaw. Not everyone even cares about a replacement; one Astak user on the Baen Bar has just peeled all the paint off of his and been quite happy to keep using it that way.

Ex-Calibre

For some reason, I have not been able to make Calibre work with the Astak. I am not sure whether this is the Astak’s problem or some flaw with Calibre (which worked just fine with my Sony).

When I posted to MobileRead about it, it was suggested that I should remove the Chinese language manual from internal memory, as it messes with Calibre’s ability to connect.

I wanted to try to do this, but it seems at the moment I cannot get the reader to connect to my computer’s USB at all. It just shows a “charging” indicator and blinking light, and does not give me a “press Enter to connect” dialogue. But others seem to be able to use Calibre with their devices just fine.

It was not a great handicap, however; I ended up just using an SD card reader to copy my books directly onto my card, which I then put in the Astak. It just takes a few extra steps to make the copy.

If I were going to keep this reader, I might be more concerned about getting Calibre working with it—but since I will be sending it back, I am not going to let it bother me.

Moving on to formats…

Mobipocket vs. ePub

First of all, the majority of the books I read are unencrypted ePub these days, from Baen. I recently downloaded all of my Webscription purchases and put them on a directory of the 2-gig SD card I normally use for my digital camera, and put that in the Astak. The books load right up with no problem.

Reading ePub books on the EZReader is, well, “EZ”. They load quickly, and I am able to access the table of contents, zoom, search, even use the read-aloud feature (once I had updated the firmware to the latest version).

However, a Mobipocket book I read on it did not fare so well. This was 1634: The Baltic War, from one of the Baen CDs hosted on The Fifth Imperium. It was not available in ePub format, so I loaded the Mobi.

I found that, though I was able to read the file, the Astak reader was unable to parse the Mobi table of contents. There was a table of contents I could jump to, but it was all HTML links and I couldn’t figure out how to click on any of those links (if it was even possible at all). I ended up having to use the “jump to page” function in the menu to navigate through the book.

Furthermore, every so often the reader would lose track of my place. I would turn it back on to find myself a few dozen or hundred pages back from where I had been. If I find myself faced with a Mobi-only title in the future (at least while I still have the Astak), I will probably go to the extra trouble to convert it with Calibre first.

eReader and PalmDoc

In email correspondence, Bob Barry, the Director of Global Business Development for Astak, said that the Astak already supports non-DRMed books in Fictionwise’s eReader format, and they are negotiating to add support for eReader DRM as well.

However, I tried testing with three unencrypted eReader books I created myself and that I had verified opened on other devices, and the Astak did not even see them in a directory listing of the SD card. Very disappointing. It appears the Astak may not be the eReader e-reader of my dreams after all.

I was able to open a book in the PalmDoc format, though since it had no table of contents navigation through it would have the same problem as Mobipocket.

Awkward File List Navigation

I should also note that the navigation through the file list is a bit of a pain if you have a large directory. My Baen e-book files take 27 screens to list, alphabetically by title, and there is not any way to jump to specific titles. (Nor can I sort them in any way except title, date, or type, which is not terribly useful in this situation.)

So if I were to want to read Worlds of Honor or Young Miles, I would have to resign myself to paging through 27 pages of files to get to the ones I wanted.

I suppose if I copied my Calibre directory onto the card rather than my unsorted Baen ePub directory I might at least be able to navigate the directory tree by author, but I would still need to know what author wrote the book I wanted.

However, I cannot now remember whether Sony’s file list interface was any better.

PDF

But the PDF format is where the Astak easily falls the shortest. I had expected that, being a more recent device, it should handle PDF files at least as well as the Sony did. (You may wish to read my review of the Sony’s PDF capabilities for comparison purposes.) However, its performance left a number of factors to be desired.

First of all, I loaded the image-only PDF of “Bronte’s Egg”. Full-page, it looked about the same as it did on the Sony, only smaller by an inch. However, when I used the “rotate” option and turned the reader 90 degrees, when I pressed “page forward” the device simply crashed back out to the file list again. I tried multiple times, and it always behaved in this way.

Moving on to Dragon Warriors, we see that in both the portrait and landscape versions, the text looks pretty good. The problem comes when we use the “zoom” function, to break the PDF out of its formatting and zoom the text in a few times. The result: the first column on the page is nowhere to be found. The text below the header starts at the beginning of the second column.

(The Sony was not perfect in this regard either, but at least it put the “Introduction” header at the middle of the page and kept the first column of text before it. But no amount of paging up would reveal that first column of text in the Astak.)

Spycraft, the 160-megabyte overformatted bloat-monster, took more than a little time to load, but once it did it looked fairly decent, if much too small to read. Rotating 90 degrees did improve the readability some—but attempting to zoom in further simply zoomed out instead—and it remained zoomed out through each of the several zoom levels, until I finally reached the one that zoomed it back in to its original half-page view.

Also, zooming, rotating, and page-turning were all extremely sluggish—not that I am surprised, given the 160-megabyte size of this monster.

Spirit of the Century, a much smaller book and less-bloated PDF, came off considerably better. The smaller page size meant it is more readable in general on the Astak, and the non-cruft formatting meant it came off considerably better zoomed in as well.

Tables of Discontent

One other annoyance had to do with the table of contents. The Astak would read the PDF’s table of contents, and this included multi-level TOCs such as the one from Spycraft.

In a multi-level table of contents, if I clicked on “4. Chapter 4: Skills” I would get another table of contents, starting off with “1. Chapter 4: Skills” and then listing subheads for 2, 3, and 4.

So assuming I want to start off at the beginning of Chapter 4, I would click 1 for “1. Chapter 4: Skills”, right? Wrong. Clicking 1 would put me back at the main TOC. To go into the chapter, I would need to click 2 or up for one of the subheads. This is not a very intuitive interface design.

Conclusion

Although ePub files are a joy to read on the Astak, other formats are considerably less so—and the interface makes getting to those files somewhat awkward when I have a lot of them. With that in mind, though I am enjoying using it while I have it, I find I will not regret sending it back when the time comes.

But if you use a Linux desktop and are sufficiently adventuresome, yes, you can use the Wine Windows simulator to run Kindle for PC.

Details at Lifehacker. Anyone care to tell how the tip there works out?

Go here, and let us know if there’s a problem preordering the PRS-900.

Nov. 18 had been mentioned earlier as the starting preorder date by TechFlash in Eric Engleman’s Q&A with Steve Haber, president of the Sony digital reading division.

The Daily Edition will actually begin shipping on or around December 18 if information from a TeleRead community member is correct (thanks, eBook Reader!).

December is also the month when Sony is to reveal the newspapers and magazines that will be available for the device. I just hope the presentation of news content is more efficient than the Kindle’s. I can’t get to the stories lickety-split the way I can reading the New York Times mobile edition on my little iPod Touch.

So who’s carrying Sony Readers right now, or about to? “Wal-mart, Best Buy, Target, Staples, Borders,” Haber has told TechFlash. “Last season was about 3,500 outlets. This year it’s 9,000. Best Buy, this is the first time they have it in stores. It was just online last year. This is a significant push for them. Wal-mart will be more stores than last year. And Staples is all new. Toys R Us.”

Meanwhile, if you own the original Sony PRS-500, you can either update your firmware or trade in the 500 for a new ePub-capable model and get a $50-$75 discount (via MobileRead). You’ll have to send in the 500 for an update—your can’t do it at home.

(Updated at 9:30 a.m.)

Related: Sony, B&N better on DRM than Amazon—but still a long way from perfection.

Without doubt, Sony’s Steve Haber and Adobe’s Bill McCoy have been more sensible on DRM than Amazon, with more flexible approaches. I applaud their efforts. But we’re a long way from nirvana. Gang, what do you think of this snippet from Boing Boing?

I recently talked to Sony’s Steve Haber, President of Digital Reading, about its flagship ebook reader. Named the "Daily Edition," it hits stores next month. Notwithstanding differences between each manufacturer’s respective libraries, it offers all the best features of its main rival, the Kindle. But Sony says it offers one thing that Amazon won’t: actual ownership of your books.

"Our commitment is that you bought it, you own it," Haber said. "Our hope is to see this as ubiquitous. Buy on any device, read on any device. … We’re obligated to have DRM but we don’t pull content back."

Um, as long as there’s DRM, Sony isn’t offering  genuine ownership of your “protected” books, a category that unfortunately includes most bestsellers. And remember, “Buy on any device, read on any device” is just a hope—and can really be achieved only without DRM or with social DRM (which could embed your name into an ePub file without destroying the ability for it to be read any ePub-capable machine). Operating systems and apps come and go. It is inherently impossible for the e-book industry to come up instantly with up-to-date, DRM-capable apps for every gizmo.

What’s more, genuine ownership means you can sell your books. Is Sony planning this?

The good news is that Adobe, Sony and B&N are hoping to provide compatible DRM approaches. That’s progress but still no substitute for lack of traditional DRM. It would also be nice to see Sony aggressively encourage publishers either to drop DRM or use social DRM, not just less restrictive forms of traditional DRM. Last I knew—this may be changing—Sony insisted that books in its store use DRM. I wonder what the more current policies of Sony and B&N will be.

With B&N, I’d call attention to the fact you can lend a book to a friend—with a 14-day period—only once as far as I know. Again, this is far from genuine ownership.

Meanwhile, in fairness to Amazon and its Kindle, let me note that you can use the K machine’s Web browser to download nonDRMed public domain books and even commercial books without “protection.”

Detail: I’m curious about Boing Boing’s mention of the Daily Edition as having a nine-inch display. Last I heard, Sony was saying the screen would be seven inches. Is Beschizza accurate here?

Related: How the New York Times was fooled? Sony’s misleading ePub-related news release, in TeleRead, and Seattle’s Bill McCoy, E-Books and Digital Distribution Expert, Leaving Adobe, in Xconomy.

The definition of DRMfree can be tricky. I’d hope that little Twilight Times Books in Kingsport, Tennessee, the publisher of my novel, could go on the list. At the same time, yes, like certain other anti-DRM houses, Twilight sells through outlets that taint all books with “protection.” Twilight has no choice. Publishing is a brutal business.

Another issue is whether social DRMed books, a compromise approach, would qualify as DRMfree. Social DRM means embedding a buyer’s name into a book to discourage copying. It is not a perfect system, given the privacy risks. But it is rather different from traditional DRM, which erects barriers against copying, even the legitimate private kind for backup purposes and the like.

However Liza treats social DRM, I hope that her list can help, and that a publication like Consumer Reports will pick up her work, refine it and circulate it widely, just as she has openly built on the efforts of others. If you want books you can truly own, then think about buying from the fiction and nonfiction names on Liza’s list, especially if the titles are in ePub format, which I suspect virtually all of them are, at least as an option.

This is not just a consumer issue, by the way. It is also one for writers. I applaud Carina Press, a new imprint from Harlequin, for promising writers not to insist on DRM—a technology that diminishes the literary value of books by linking them to the survival of individual publishers and specific technologies. I want books to be a permanent medium. DRM—beyond the penalties it imposes readers, especially the disabled—is the enemy of that.

My other proposed addition, besides Twilight Times: Baen, which for years has shunned “protection” and probably has never published a DRMed book.

(Via @jafurtado.)

The subject is the news. Lulu now allows upload and sale of ePubs. DRM is optional.

Lulu have revised their prices. Lulu used to sell PDFs on a straight 20% margin. Lulu now sell both PDFs and ePubs on the basis of $1.49 + 20% of the remainder.

If you want to add Adobe DRM to your ebook, it costs an extra $0.99 PER SALE.

I suspect that my ePub is one of the first available at Lulu, as I’ve found several teething troubles in their uploading system, including the inability to add a custom cover image due to some faulty sanity checks on image size.

http://www.lulu.com/content/e-book/desbarollda-the-waltzing-mouse/7867672

They do have a nice facility to upload an ePub sample.

Hello Paul,

I’m contacting you, because I’d like to inform you about a new free Firefox addon called “EPUBReader” with which you can read ePub files directly in Firefox. EPUBReader is developed by me. I thought you could be interested in this information and if you publish an article where this fits in, it would be great if you could mention it.

Here some more background information:

Before I started the development, I checked if something similar exists. Of course I found OpenBerg, but OpenBerg seems not to support Firefox 3.*. So I decided to write a new addon which would support the current Firefox versions.

- Why use EPUBReader instead of a special ePub-reading software?

Of course there is free software out there to read ePub-files on your PC. The difference is that you have to install and start a new software, in case of EPUBReader you can just use a program (Firefox) you probably use anyway.

The main reason why I thought it would be a good idea to create EPUBReader as an Firefox addon is, that an ePub-file is basically an archive of HTML-files. So why not use a program which is specialized in displaying HTML-files and many people have already installed? The great benefit is, that in that way you don’t have to bother with rendering and display of the HTML-files because Firefox does this for you. So the limit of what is possible to display is set by Firefox and not by a special ePub-software. And I think Firefox is always at the cutting edge.

- How can you navigate through an ePub-file?

This is probably the main difference between EPUBReader and other ePub-reading software. EPUBReader just displays the ePub-file as it is: there are several HTML-pages with the content and a Table of Contents which links the HTML-pages, that’s it. Other reader-software simulates pages which don’t exist in reality to give you the feeling you read a real book. To reach this goal they have to do calculations which decreases performance. My decision was to keep it as simple as possible which also means as fast as possible. This resulted in the mentioned navigation. I received already feedback concerning this topic: some people don’t like it, because they want to jump from page to page like in books, other people like it because of it’s simplicity and speed.

Here is a link to EPUBReader’s homepage, where you can find a FAQ and a link for installation. I have uploaded the addon to the Mozilla Addon website. You can see there, that the addon is still marked as “experimental”. This means that it’s still not reviewed by Mozilla (which unfortunately takes several weeks). Nevertheless, according to the feedback I received, the addon works pretty good.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

Thank you very much.

Kind Regards,

Michael Volz

In the Android world, the top free e-book reader is apparently WordPlayer Art of War, from Andrew Sacher. Here’s what the Market listing says: “WordPlayer is a book reader that allows you to add to your library from amongst thousands of instantly downloadable books or load epub books. WordPlayer’s page navigation, highlighting, bookmarking, and customizable settings make reading a breeze. Comes with Sun Tzu’s classic book of strategy, Art of War, already installed.”

Oh, and get this—from the WordPlayer site: “Use our seamless integration with the Calibre ebook library management application to transfer many types of ebooks to your phone, including CBZ, CBR, CBC, EPUB, FB2, HTML, LIT, MOBI, ODT, PDF, many PRC, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, and TXT formats.” It would be great for everything to be ePub from the start, especially without DRM. But I like WordPlayer’s approach of leveraging on Calibre’s popularity.

Does Art of War live up to the ballyhoo? Anyone here used it? Or can you do so for fellow TeleRead community members and share your impressions?

Other apps of possible interest

Meanwhile here are other Andorid apps of possible interest, beyond two already-familiar ones, FBReader and the Aldiko reader (both of which also can display ePub, among other formats). Not owning an Android device—this could change!—I haven’t tested them.

–JETCET PDF, a demo app. “Download PDFs using the browser or view your PDF attachments in gmail.

–Documents to Go (demo and paid). “Allows you to use Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint & Adobe PDF files – all in one complete package. Easily create, view, edit, save & send attachments while our InTact Technology maintains 100% of the original file formatting. Supports Office 2007 & password-protected files.”

–Scan2PDF Mobile ($14.99 for paid version), shown to the right. Also available for Windows Mobile and coming for the iPhone. “a revolutionary new software release which uses your mobile phone to scan documents and convert them to PDF files.”

–Quickpedia., from NextMobile Web “Wikipedia formatted for your Android phone. With Quickpedia, you can do most of what you already do on Wikipedia: search, browse articles, featured pages, and current events. Plus, Quickpedia can find Wikipedia articles near your current GPS position!”

–Free Dictionary. “To Begin, just type! Words starting with what you are typing will appear automagically under the textbox. Also if you do not know the spelling just keep typing. Possible typographical error will appear as “Did you mean:”

–SpeedyMarks thesaurus. “Retrieve the synonym for every word. If available you will get antonyms, related terms, similar word and user suggestions too.”

–USA Today.

Usual reminder/disclosure: I own a tiny tiny speck of Google (the real people behind Android) for retirement investment purposes, though you might not think that if you go by my warnings against Google and Amazon dominating too much of the e-book biz.

Adobe’s interests are far more aligned with the adoption of open formats that we can address with our authoring tools and services. We see e-book DRM as an enabler for a larger market, one that we can address with our tools and services on a level playing field vs. proprietary silos that give a choke-hold to players who have a strong position in the book distribution value chain. We don’t forecast revenue from e-book DRM even in the best case ever itself being a large material business for Adobe—large enough to pay its way and allow us to sustain and enhance the solution, but quite small relative to our other tools and services.

I’ve said before that Adobe’s open to evolving towards a non-proprietary ubiquitous DRM standard, even as we see obstacles to getting there in the near future (especially around IP enablement). What we don’t want to see is one proprietary solution taking over control, or fragmentation of multiple proprietary solutions. Publishers have already voted with their feet, so to speak, by requiring/letting Amazon deploy DRM. If the only reasonable cross-platform alternative for eBooks was to go DRM-free, then some publishers would distribute only through Amazon, leading to everyone else getting "iTunesd". So to me it’s pretty obvious that cross-platform eBook DRM that works with EPUB and PDF is necessary to ensure that the open, cross-platform alternative wins. But if every publisher were to choose to go DRM free, using PDF & EPUB but not DRM, hey I’d have absolutely no problem with that outcome.

Even so, I remain a gung-ho ePub backer. Publishers such as Hachette will tell you of the economies that ePub has achieved as a distribution format. And if consumers care more about books than about brand names, then they’ll go for ePub, which will increase the number of reading choices. The new Sony wireless reader will eventually let you download from a whole bunch of e-stores. And standards will make that possible. Already many more books exist in the ePub format than the Kindle format, especially with public domain titles included. Just recently, as chronicled by Fran Toolan and picked up by if:book, the Internet Archive announced that all of its 1.6 million books were available in ePub format—ready to be read on anything from a Sony Reader to an iPhone. That’s a proud Brewster Kahle, archive founder, in the photo. At the same time, Google, the archive’s big rival in the public domain area, continues to offer ePub, not just PDF.

Meanwhile Ross Rubin of the NPD consulting group has observed that "It is all but assured that any other major consumer electronics vendor that enters the e-reader market moving forward will support ePUB." Rubin raises the issue of Amazon continuing to sell proprietary-format books even while supporting ePub in its hardware, but I think that in the end standardization could offer too many economies and other advantages for Amazon to resist. Notice how the Sony eBook Store has ditched its proprietary format in favor of ePub? To put it mildly, ePub has already shown up the skeptics and couldn’t be more relevant to the future of the e-book industry.

So why is the Kindle 2 is faring well without ePub? Because Amazon offers good ergonomics and other wrinkles such as wireless downloads and text to speech. And because many consumers and journalists have not yet fully caught on to the follies of proprietary formats. Why should my eternal access to a book—read on machines I buy in the future—depend so heavily on Amazon or its treatment of e-books or me? The more sophisticated e-booklovers become, the more likely they’ll demand ePub, ideally nonDRMed, so they can own ePub books for real.

Let me also add that, regardless of the successes of ePub, it could be faring still better if the big publishers were not such tightwads when it came to supporting the IPDF. I don’t see ePub developing as rapidly as it would, technically and commercially, with proper backing. But perhaps in a sense that’s good news. Imagine what ePub—with such touches as better ePub promo, a logo and reliable interbook linking—could do for e-books. I hear that the IDPF is at work on such matters. Good, as long as it’s less sluggish than about the logo. Go ePub!

Related: Is ePub important for an ereader? Maybe not, says Amazon Kindle Review.

The Rubin-related link: Big thanks, Felix (even if I know we don’t always see eye to eye on format and DRM issues)!

I agree despite the existence of spiffy new gizmos like Barnes and Noble’s Nook, shown here. The reason isn’t just the expected Apple tablet, which should be good for a bunch of tasks, not just book-reading. My guess is that a slew of e-readers will be out with Pixel Qi technology. PixelQi will let one screen work in an E Ink-style mode (low power consumption, high resolution) or a traditional LCD one (color).

So what does that mean? Well, B&N Nook, which includes a small color screen to go with the E Ink one, might not seem so hot with all the Pixel Qi-based competition I anticipate (nothing definite here, just clues from Pixel QI).

I also wonder about the recently unveiled EnTourage eDG e-reader/netbook, another two-screened creature. What’s the use of LCD and E Ink in one reader if Pixel  QI can handle both modes well well?

Of course, factors such as the number of books available should also matter, not just the capabilities of the hardware.

Amazon might be the winner in the numbers game if you exclude the hundreds of thousands of public domain books that the Nook can access. But that could change and maybe already has if you go by the B&N line.

At any rate, keep in mind the e-book-capable Apple tablet on the way; and besides, a Kindle-capable app should be available for it.

Furthermore, I wouldn’t be surprised if a widely circulated Adobe reader app for the Apple will appear and be able to read books in ePub. A German reader for Adobe-DRMed ePub books on the iPhone has already been announced, one more sign that the ePub standard is winning over large publishers.

What’s more, Adobe and B&N are apparently moving toward a common DRM system for ePub. Amazon may well find it harder in the future to compete with Kindle-only books and may well adopt ePub. With or without Adobe DRM? I don’t know—just that if Jeff Bezos were really smart and wanted to disrupt the competition, he’d back off from DRMed books, the way he did from DRMed music. Or he could use social DRM. If the big houses didn’t go along, Jeff could think seriously about playing up books from more enlightened smaller publishers. Talk about all the changes that just might be ahead, or at least should!

Meanwhile Amazon’s Kindle reading apps for the PC—downloadable in November, with a Mac version coming a few months later—should help you buy a little time, if you’re insistent on reading Kindle-format books but don’t want to buy a an actual Kindle right now.

And for ePub and Adobe-DRMed ePub, Sony offers a desktop reading app for PCs and Macs.

Bottom line: Think twice before locking into 2009 products, at least dedicated e-reading hardware, when the 2010 variety could be so much better. If nothing else, remember that a netbook or general-purpose tablet might be best for you both today and in 2010.

Related: E-book comparison matrix from DealNews, via D.A. Also see Technologizer’s cheat seet (via Reading 2.0 list).

Reminder: DRMed ePub still won’t be an open, nonproprietary standard. Alas, big publishers are still insisting on DRM.

This depends on Sony and the others updating their Adobe-supplied firmware for their dedicated e-readers. So there are gotcha indeed (yes, I’ve revised this post). Let’s hope that other companies will include the new DRM for compatibility’s sake—even though the best solution would be no DRM. See a helpful explanation from Adobe’s Jim Lester.

On the social DRM front…

Meanwhile another question arises. Could Adobe and B&N also be moving social DRM in time? With help from a reader, I noticed the following in an Adobe release:

“Barnes & Noble is adopting Adobe(r) Content Server, a server software solution that copy protects eBooks downloaded to nook, mobile phone applications and other dedicated eBook reading devices that have integrated the Adobe Reader Mobile SDK. Additionally, Adobe is integrating Barnes & Noble’s eReader social content protection technology into Adobe Content Server, Adobe Reader Mobile SDK and, eventually, into Adobe Digital Editions.

“With this enhanced version of Adobe Content Server, publishers and booksellers will be able to protect EPUB and PDF eBooks through either social password or identity-based authentication options, allowing their readers access to interoperable eBook content across diverse platforms.” That isn’t quite the same as basic social DRM—you know, simply embedding names or other identifying data in files to discourage piracy. But maybe it’ll help pave the way for it.

Fictionwise, a subsidiary of B&N, uses a DRM system based on scrambled credit card numbers (not the same as social DRM at the plain-English level).

Note: For info on the Nook e-reader from B&N, see the basics plus Paul Biba’s report from the press conference announcing the product.

Related: TeleRead on social DRM.