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.

As publishers, we want our readers to be as free as possible to do what they want with the books we sell them, as long as we don’t get robbed.

Classic DRM doesn’t do this. It ties the reader to particular reading devices and software and imposes unreasonable restrictions — on lending or giving away e-books — simply because the technology can’t regulate these activities and so must ban them. Classic DRM is equally bad for the publisher because he has to buy in (literally) to one DRM platform or another and be tied to a specific distributor who can provide support for it. He sees important word-of-mouth amplifiers such as lending banned, and the giving of his e-books as gifts made virtually impossible. Word of all, for both reader and publisher, DRMed books suffer from bitrot and in a decade from now most of them will be unreadable.

Social DRM is the obvious, humane alternative. We all know what the reasonable use of a book is, even if we can’t necessarily formulate rules that capture its essence. So let’s mark each e-book with its buyer’s fingerprint and tell the buyer to act fairly and reasonably. A fingerprinted e-book can be read on any e-book reader in the world, and always will be readable on them. If someone makes illicit copies for all his friends and relations, we won’t notice, but equally we won’t lose much. If someone decides to ruin us by selling thousands of copies of the book we sold him, we’ll buy one of those copies, see who he is, and ruin him back.

That’s the theory. Now for the questions.

Is anyone actually using social DRM?

Is it working?

If, by making available a reasonably-priced socially-DRMed e-book, we remove the reasonable  motives for hacking, will it stop happening? Or are there enough fundamentalist neo-Stallmanites around who will make it a point of honour to get hold of every book, remove its DRM fingerprints, and make it available for free download? “Books are information and information wants to be free”.

Are there methods of social DRM marking that will survive a passage through (for example) Calibre?

Can we build a consensus that fingerprinting is honest and respectable, and persuade toolmakers to preserve it on file conversion and not to supply tools for removing it?

The TeleRead take: Hey, Spider, that’s an interesting observation—now that many e-reader-makers will be using Adobe “protection” and the Sony eBook Store will rely on it.

Now a question for knowledgeable TeleRead community members. For legal reasons, please don’t get into specifics; but in a general way, without revealing any how-to details or giving links to this information, tell us how easy you think Adobe’s DRM will be to crack. Amusingly, Microsoft .lit is a hit among some e-book techies because it is so simple to strip away the “protection”—not for piracy in most cases, but rather for the sake of convenience, such as for format conversions or backups or use on a bunch of devices.

I doubt it’ll be a challenge to crack Adobe DRM; tips are already circulating. This—beyond availability of scanners for use in making pirated copies of paper books—is one reason why I believe it would actually be safer for publishers not to rely on DRM in their business plans. Much better to avoid DRM or use social DRM and gear up to sue high-profile pirates, whom DRM won’t discourage anyway.

Meanwhile I suspect that many techies owning Kindles will look forward to cracking Adobe-DRMed ePub for conversion to Mobipocket or another K-usable format.

(Nutcracker photo from Wikipedia—taken by M. Minderhoud.)

But wait! Hasn’t Jeff Bezos himself given strong hints that Amazon will work to get Kindle books on a bunch of platforms?

Considering the far-from-gung-ho reactions to B&N’s current e-bookstore, I wouldn’t worry that much in Jeff’s shoes, at least for now. Amazon still has more of a chance of dominating e-books. B&N so far has tuned out me and others pleading for the chain to try to ditch traditional DRM in favor of no DRM or social DRM so people can own books for real. Talk about a stubborn refusal to consider this major product differentiation!

Meanwhile, writing for the Guardian, Victor Keegan notes how power has flowed from traditional publishers to Google and Amazon and, perhaps, Apple in time.

One way for publishers to win back their lost power

But can’t publishers mitigate and perhaps even reverse the above by insisting on a standard e-book format without proprietary DRM (a major negative even with a multiplatform approach)?

Keegan talks about the possible end of book ownership. But you can have ownership if you phase out DRMed anything in favor of nonDRMed ePub, the core format on which major publishers have agreed. Let ePub be plain vanilla ePub, not Adobe-ized ePub or Sonyized ePub or B&Nized ePub or, in the future, maybe Amazonized or Googleized ePub. No 800-pound gorillas!

DRM vs. max inventory

DRM and other proprietary baggage can get in the way of readers locating what they want, even at Amazon, where, despite all those hundreds of thousands of titles, I still can’t find Saul Bellows’ masterpieces in E. Proprietary tech jacks up costs and makes books less likely to be candidates for conversion.

Quartet’s Don Linn is right, right, right when he says great lists aren’t enough—that publishers also must navigate labyrinthian distribution systems. DRM-enforced proprietary approaches just add to the complexities. Perhaps Bellows’ heirs are insisting on “protection.” But they might well be open to something less onerous like social DRM, especially if they understood the piracy threat from scanning of paper books.

For now, publishing is horridly dysfunctional. But do we really need an 800-pound corporate gorilla to fix it? I’d hope not. Amazon’s Orweilian episode and Apple’s seeming attempt to squelch e-book competition make me wish more than ever for a mix of an open format and an open distribution system built around standards rather than bureaucracy or any one corporate hierarchy. No gorilla worship, please.

But meanwhile I was pleased to see another insider, Calvin Reid over at Publishers Weekly, note the following in his writeup of the IDPF’s Digitial Book 2009 conference: “More than ever Digital Rights Management—and even the notion of e-book piracy—was portrayed as more of a problem to the developing e-book market than e-book piracy itself.”

Exactly, Calvin. Perhaps someday you won’t just note the discontent with DRM but publicly share it. This is a revenue-drainer. Speakers such as Sarah Wendell of Smart Bitches / Trashy Books were right on the money about the damage DRM is doing. What we have is a major disconnect between insiders and outsiders. Here’s a Reid excerpt illustrating this:

“Harlequin director of digital content Malle Vallik said Harlequin publishes more e-books (140 titles) each month than print books, though she admitted that Harlequin authors demand DRM—to a display of dismay and mock weeping by Wendell. ‘Our readers want e-books,’ said Vallik, “whatever sells in print sells just as well in digital. Backlist is big and half our sales each month. Readers want interoperability, more titles, nicely designed devices, adjustable fonts and blurbs for fiction.’”

Hey, Malle, perhaps it’s time for Harlequin to begin an intensive education program to remind writers that DRM is a laugh in this era of scanners. And how about Social DRM, which makes widespread interoperability and other amenities a lot easier to achieve with ePub books than with traditional DRM in use? Harlequin is leader in e-books, home to many good things, and perhaps you can experiment with social DRM in a major way—that is, embedding the names of readers in books to discourage copying. Give it a shot, if you aren’t already! No need for Smart Bitch Sarah to weep.

They understand that if a publisher, store or tech company goes out of business, you eventually may not be able to access a DRMed book. You really don’t own DRM-blighted titles for real. You’re just leasing them.

So who are the heroes in the anti-DRM struggle?

Among the stars, as I see it, are Steve and Scott Pendergrast, the owners of Fictionwise, who offer DRM only because publishers insist on it. They really prefer that books appear in a bunch of formats without DRM, and as a bonus they’re updating their eReader software to handle ePub, the industry standard.

Please help the anti-DRM cause by using the comments section of this post to name your own favorite anti-DRM examples. Or e-mail me. Mention the good guys’ actions or planned actions. Mark Coker, moderator of Tools of Change’s Feb. 10 panel on the rise of e-books, will be celebrating these anti-DRM heroes during the panel.

Below, to help get you going, are some of my other choices for the anti-DRM honors—listed in no particular order, except that I’ll mention publishers first.

• Small publishers such as Lida Quillen of Twilight Times Books (home to The Solomon Scandals, my own novel), who arranged with the Pendergrasts for her books not to be infested with DRM at Fictionwise’s eReader.com site. Who are your own favorite small publishers battling against DRM? Some of the romance houses, such as Ellora’s Cave, have led the way. For publishers like Lida, one of the big frustrations is that stores such as Mobipocket’s insist on use of DRM. And my impression is that publishers have to go out of their way for Kindle Store books not to be DRMed, assuming that Amazon will let them. It’s another indication that DRM is really better as a monopoly-promoter than as a genuine protector of intellectual property in the era of the scanner and crowd-sourced transcription of popular books.
• Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan. Pan Mac is laudably asking writers not to insist on DRM, when they sign up. It’s already offering some DRM-free titles. Most Pac Mac e-books are still DRMed, but ideally this can change over time.
• Tim O’Reilly, Andrew Savikas and colleagues at O’Reilly Media (TOC organizer), which is promoting new books as DRM free and is also championing the ePub format. Perhaps someone at O’Reilly can enlighten us as to the DRM situation with past titles. Significantly, within the book world, O’Reilly is known as a technological leader.

• Random House, which in the past has at least experimented with nonDRMed books, and which is encouraging authors of audio books to drop DRM.
• Wiley, which publishes books in a number of areas, including the technical one, O’Reilly’s specialty. It, too, has experimented with DRM-free books. Laudably this house has even tried social DRM, which isn’t "protection" in the traditional sense. Rather books come with users’ names embedded, as a way to discourage sharing. This doesn’t interfere with long-term ownership of books.
• Richard Nash of Soft Skull Press, who, through Wowio, let his titles appear without DRM (yes, Wowio itself deserves praising for relying on a form of social DRM rather than traditional DRM). Soft Skull will be releasing a number of e-books on its own for the iPhone and, I suspect, other formats. And my bet is that Richard will avoid DRM.
• Smashwords (Mark’s company), Book Glutton and other new outlets for independent authors—which aren’t hobbling themselves with any DRM.
• Marc Prud’hommeaux and Neelan Choksi at Lexcycle, who, while offering DRM to publisher as an option, have strongly spoken out against its use.
• Jon Noring. Early on, as a small publisher, Jon discovered that "protection" harmed e-books. His tiny Blue Grass Publishing avoids DRM entirely.
• Cory Doctorow. He’s consistently slammed DRM in his blog and lobbied against it among fellow writers.
• Jeff Gomez, now at Penguin, who, during his names as an Internet marketer for Macmillian, wrote Print Is Dead—where he took some swipes at DRM even though I’m sure that many of his publishing colleagues didn’t especially cotton to this criticism. Let’s hope that Macmillan and Penguin will both pay attention to Jeff’s warning that DRM detracts from price leverage (even though I don’t think that people want to may $20 for e-books, "protected" or not).
• Hadrien Gardeur at Feedbooks, a mostly public domain site, which in the future will be getting into commercial books and doing its best to avoid DRM.
• Techmeme, which, like TeleRead, has regularly published examples of DRM as an anti-consumer technology. So has MobileRead. Keep it up!

In responding, please list or link to the Web addresses of the people involved, and in the cases of stores and publishers, tell how far along they are in dropping DRM. Realistically publishers can’t always wean themselves away from DRM overnight—given their existing commitments.

Update, noon EST: Yes, it would be nice to have mentioned Baen—which for years has been clueful about DRM and hates it with a passion, just as my own publisher does.  Check out the late Jim Baen’s record. As noted, however, I didn’t claim to be mentioning everyone. I want people to help me fill in the gaps. I’m sure there are players missing as important as Baen. Help Mark and me out!

Detail: Yes, as the author of this post, I hereby declare myself ineligible for mention.

Check out a Slashdot item and CNET article for more on iTune’s use of social DRM. What’s more, eReader gets more or less into social DRM territory by including encrypted credit card numbers in files. Of course, purist might argue that the actual name of the purchaser should be always visible (see related comments).

Despite the flaws…

The best “protection” is none—why penalize legitimate owners?—but I hope that e-book publishers will pay close attention to iTunes and the better side of the music industry. Are big publishers really more conservative than RIAA members?

Despite the privacy risks, Social DRM is far more consumer-friendly than traditional DRM. At the very least, e-book-lovers ought to have a choice.

Image credit: Here. CC-licensed.

(Thanks to Arthur Atwell, cofounder of Electric Book Works in Cape Town, South Africa, for the tip.)

Time for Sony’s e-book side to experiment with DRMless ePub, which its new reader devices can display? Maybe with social DRM? I think so! Without traditional DRM to gum things up, ePub is a standard for real. Sony and independent stores—the company laudably plans to reach out to indies, when its forthcoming readers go wireless—could exploit this to the max in marketing. "Buy from us and own your e-books for real."

My personal stake is this matter—as a writer

I know: Sony will need cooperation from publishers. But at least the DRMless approach should be available as an option for cooperating houses. I’d love to see The Solomon Scandals offered through Sony without "protection"; I’m not just talking theory here. My publisher, too, dislikes DRM’s hassles for consumers. To one extent or another, the technology is a threat to our livelihoods, and I really dislike Amazon’s DRM requirements. A DRMless option would be one way for Sony and friends to distinguish themselves from Amazon and woo consumers and forward-looking publishers.

A reminder: The TeleBlog has both pro- and anti-DRM readers, and I encourage both sides to speak up here, in a civil way.

Related: Wikipedia item on Sony Music Entertainment.

Image credit for "Social Way" photo: Casey West.

“For eBooks, I really like the ’social DRM’ approach of The Pragmatic Programmers, who ’stamp’ PDF eBooks with a ‘For the Exclusive Use of …’ and the name of the purchaser.”

Traditional Digital Rights Management (DRM) requires implementing technological obstacles that prevent the purchaser of a digital object from copying, displaying, and accessing the object except in limited ways. These obstacles can cause endless aggravation to the consumer. For example a Kindle format e-book cannot be read on an iPhone or iPod touch even though the hardware sales of the latter Apple devices dwarf the sales of the Amazon device. (Update: Kindle e-books are now readable on the iPhone and iPod Touch but are still unreadable on PCs and Macs.)

I do not know if McCoy invented the term “social DRM”, but his blog post certainly helped to popularize the term. The article facilitated an important dialogue about e-book security, and this post is not meant to be discourteous. However at this stage of the conversation I suggest that the term “social DRM” should be replaced by “digital watermark” or simply “watermark”.

Physical watermarks are well known for paper stationery and the idea has been expanded to apply to digital pictures, music, video and now e-books. For additional background there is a useful Wikipedia entry on the term digital watermarking. Here are some reasons for the switch:

• The term “social DRM” is confusing because it does not really refer to an “access control” technology. Instead it refers to a technology for “tracking” and “display”.
• The term “social DRM” verges on the oxymoronic since “social” is nearly the opposite of “DRM” in the context of e-book “security”.
• Agitating against DRM while simultaneously being open to “social DRM” is terminologically confusing.
• The existing term “digital watermark” or “watermark” can typically be substituted for “social DRM” and the meaning can be preserved.
• There is a rich preexisting vocabulary for watermark description and classification such as “perceptible” and “imperceptible”; “fragile”, “semi-fragile”, and “robust”.

I was originally planning to provide a cluster of suggestions to replace or supplement the term “social DRM” such as: customize, tailor, imprint, stamp, inscribe, personalize, endorse, bookplate, dedication page, insert page, fingerprint, hash, and signature. But the easiest approach appears to be adopting the expression watermark.

Here is an example of how to use the term “watermark”: I wish Amazon would use a standard open format without DRM for its Kindle e-books. If Amazon deems some security measure necessary then why not try watermarks. With watermarks and an open convertible format I could still read my Kindle format e-book on my cell phone, computer, or dedicated e-book hardware (with conversion if needed). The catalog of e-books for the Kindle is extensive with Amazon claiming “more than 190,000 books available, including more than 109 of 112 current New York Times Best Sellers.” Please do not lock up this catalog by coercively tethering e-books to the Kindle hardware using DRM.

The landscape image above is a fragment of a picture in the Flickr photostream of Shiny Things. I have superimposed a watermark image of the word watermark. Some rights reserved.

Leading Publishers and Distributors Secure Digital Content With New Adobe Content Server 4

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Sept. 9, 2008 — Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced Adobe® Content Server 4, a new server software solution that copy protects downloadable eBooks for Adobe Digital Editions, Adobe’s free client software for purchasing, managing and reading eBooks.

Adobe Content Server 4 enables publishers, retailers, libraries and other distributors to leverage hundreds of thousands of titles for sale or loan and was developed in concert with more than 30 industry partners worldwide (see separate quote sheet ), including Booxen Co. Ltd, Ciando, Ebooks Corporation, Hachette Livre, HarperCollins, Ingram Digital, Jouve, LibreDigital, NetLibrary, Overdrive, Random House, Value Chain International Ltd, and others.

Today, Adobe Digital Editions is popularizing the digital reading experience on both Microsoft Windows and Macintosh systems and emerging platforms, such as the Reader Digital Book by Sony®.

“We know digital book customers want a broad selection of content, a choice of reading platforms and devices and the option to get their eBook from their favorite retailer, local public library or directly from the publisher,” said Paul Weiskopf, senior vice president, Corporate Development at Adobe. “Adobe Content Server 4 enables the publishing industry to meet all these needs for eBook customers while, at the same time, protecting valuable copyrights.”

The new server software supports Portable Document Format (PDF) and the EPUB file format, an XML-based industry standard with broad support from the publishing industry and the Association of American Publishers. With support for the EPUB format, publishers, libraries and content aggregators are able to securely distribute reflowable digital content to the smaller screens of mobile devices. Adobe InDesign® CS3 software helps publishers to easily export the content to the EPUB format and PDF.

Adobe Content Server 4 improves file security and flexible permissions, as well as retail and library lending support, which directly benefits aggregators, online distributors and publishers of eBook content through copy protection. eBook files can be hosted in existing Web infrastructures and business processes, providing easy and seamless integration with media servers, databases and e-commerce systems. The software features a pay-as-you-go pricing model for content distribution, and quick downloads for consumers.

Adobe Content Server 4 is fully compatible with Adobe Digital Editions 1.6 software, a free, lightweight desktop application that allows users to manage and read documents and rich, interactive digital content in an intuitive user interface created using Adobe Flash® software. The software delivers enhanced flexibility through named activation and enables users to move content across platforms and supported mobile devices like the new Sony Reader Digital Book.

Pricing and Availability

Adobe Content Server 4 and Adobe Digital Editions 1.6 are expected to be available in North America on September 22. The new server software runs on multiple operating systems, including Windows, Solaris and Linux, and requires a minimum of 1 GB of memory. Adobe Digital Editions 1.6 will be available as a free download for Windows and Macintosh systems.

Content Server 4 will be available for the initial fee of $6500USD, with no limits on the amount of content able to be protected or fulfilled, and will also include a pay-per-use subscription to a digital signing service. There are no restrictions on the numbers of CPUs on which the software can be installed. Adobe Content Server 3 will be discontinued with the introduction of Adobe Content Server 4. For full system requirement information and migration details, visit www.adobe.com/products/contentserver .

About Adobe Systems Incorporated

Adobe revolutionizes how the world engages with ideas and information – anytime, anywhere and through any medium. For more information, visit www.adobe.com .

EFF’s advocacy of social DRM as an alternative to the usual kind—a compromise, even though the best "protection" is none—would also help.  No, we’re not talking about encryption here.

Social DRM is hardly without flaws, but would still be a nice, gentle way of reminding the users of both their rights and the creators’. I can even see social DRM systems set up to allow buying and selling of e-books in keeping with the first sale doctrine.

Related: Social DRM, Watermarking and Ex-Libris.

The Pogue book served up this way will be Windows Vista: The Missing Manual.

And significantly, he’s "encouraging O’Reilly to adopt some antipiracy steps, like adding a footer at the bottom of each page that says, ‘This edition specially prepared for bgates@microsoft.com (or whatever your e-mail address is). That might deter people from posting their copies online for all to download.’

Wow. Sounds like social DRM. Nice going, David! The best arrangement would be nothing—that’s what I’ll do with my forthcoming book—but this sure beats the normal DRM.

Detail: Above link is PW-protected. I hope to replace it with one that isn’t.

Some of the wisest utterances on topics like DRM and colliding e-book formats are coming from the British publishing community.

A gutsy PW equivalent in the U.K.—far braver and smarter than the wimpy Yankee variety, which zapped my anti-DRM, anti-eBabel blog—has just published a memorable article on the very problems that so many American book people are sweeping under the carpet.

In eBabel on and on, The Bookseller explains the mess in terms that even the dumbest blockheads on our side of The Pond ought to understand. And it does so without ignoring the nuances.

"It’s the DRM, stupid"

Under a subhead that might have come from the TeleBlog—"it’s the DRM, stupid"—Features Editor Tom Tivnan warns: "…Even within format, different publishers’ DRM can vary, affecting device readability. Files wrapped with DRM also contain a variety of restrictions, such as whether a customer can print or not, if the file can download to other devices, or whether it can be emailed.

"Even within formats, DRM continues to evolve. As Martyn Daniels, vice-president of sales and marketing at digital content management specialist Value Chain International, explains: ‘Mobipocket, for example, has gone though several incarnations. If you are using, say, a Mobi 3.0 file and the device you are using reads Mobi 6.0, it will still be able to read it, but there will be subtle differences that affect performance.’"

Tivnan even provides a glossary of formats—from ePub to eReader. Guess which he lists firsts? Nice priorities, Tom.

The Moi angle: My opinion—and perhaps yours, too

While PW has made me a nonperson in the best Orwellian tradition—the cowards at PW actually killed the online archives of my E-Book Report blog—the Bookseller has the nerve to quote me. Tivnan nicely sums up what’s on my mind and yours, if you’re like many members of the TeleRead community.

"David Rothman, an American writer who runs the e-book blog Tele-read.org, believes that DRM is anti-consumer and is relatively in-effective against piracy. He says: ‘DRM penalises legitimate owners with various restrictions, such as limits on the number of devices. If a book is truly popular and big money is at stake, then both amateur and professional pirates can scan paper copies, or even type them out, as happened with Harry Potter.’"

Social DRM mentioned

The Bookseller goes on: "Rothman has called for publishers to agree to ’social DRM’—an idea mooted by Bill McCoy, the general manager of Adobe’s ePublishing business—no technical restrictions other than stamping a file with ‘This e-book is the property of . . .’ Social DRM, Rothman believes, would open up the e-book market, and prohibit one dominant player such as Amazon from elbowing others out. He says: ‘The real irony with Amazon is that they have been doing wonderful things with music MP3s and anti-DRM on music downloads. The damaging thing is that Amazon is using DRM to herd customers into the Kindle away from other devices. This is not good news for publishers.’

"Most publishers have thus far been leery about committing to non-DRM. However, at this year’s London Book Fair, Pan Mac digital director Sara Lloyd, while stressing she was expressing a personal view, argued that e-books without DRM would boost the e-book market."

Detail: I’ll e-mail the Bookseller about that hyphen in Tele-read.org—which would prevent some people from reaching us. Hmm. This is obviously the Brits’ revenge for all the Americanized spellings I’ve inflicted on our much-valued contributors from outside the states. More seriously, as an old print guy I can understand what happened. The online edition was probably picking up the spelling from the print side, which wouldn’t be so sensitive to such things. I’ve just bought tele-read.org, and a forward to teleread.org should soon kick in.

Where I’d respectfully disagree with a Bookman writer: U.S. Correspondent Gayle Feldman defends Michael Gorman, the not-so-open-minded past president of the American Library Association. I can appreciate Gorman’s concern over cut-and-paste and the E medium’s lack of permanence. But the transition to E will happen, whether he and Feldman want it to or not; and that is why I keep pushing the idea of a well-organized national digital library systems with provisions for guarding the integrity of e-books and other items and assuring trustworthy storage—and, yes, with standard formats to the maximum extent possible. Yes, E is a fluid medium. But, Wikipedia fashion, you can make snapshots and play up the more significant ones.

Related: Tom Tivnan’s separate blog post where he mentions ePub as an exchange format for publishers, but notes the need to make things easier for readers. I would have phrased things a bit different—to be exact, I’d emphasize that the Kindle and other e-reading devices need to be able to read an ePub file natively, without any need for translation—but that’s just a detail. Once again, the Bookseller has the right idea. Make e-books as easy as possible to use, and don’t just turn the industry over to Amazon (or, I’d add, Google even though I own a tiny speck of stock in the latter).

Yes, Mobipocket would do well to render ePub natively without translation. But auto-convert is still a nice step forward despite shortcomings, and I hope that Amazon will consider the same capabilities for its Kindle device, which can read nonDRMed Mobi.

An iPhone reader is among the new versions of Mobi that will be available later this year. Nice going! Oh, how there’s more to life than PDF! On top of everything else, at least some of the cheapie new Astak machines will probably be runnning Mobi, in which case they will be able to display converted ePub.

ePub creation, too, perhaps—via Mobi apps

Laudably, too, Mobipocket apparently will soon let you create ePub files through the next gens of Mobi Creator and Mobigen. That’s my impression from a MobileRead post from Nate the Great (see update). Hello, small publishers? This might be it in many cases—your way to conform to IDPF standards and have the files readable on one of the world’s most popular e-reading systems.

While I’ve never been shy about criticizing the business practices of Amazon, Mobi’s parent company, I’ve always considered Mobipocket’s software to be more usable than rivals’. Now if only Mobi and Amazon can experiment with social DRM, as Wiley is doing. Maybe for some Amazon Shorts, if nothing else? People want to own e-content for real, and dropping traditional DRM and offering ePub would bolster consumer confidence in the medium and make more money for everyone, Amazon, included.

Note: I changed my ePub “File Associations” in Vista from Adobe Digital Editions to Mobipocket, and sure enough, when I clicked on a downloaded ePub of Flatland from Feedbooks, Mobi instantly converted the novel.

Update, 6 p.m.: I’ve followed up with questions to Mobipocket, and I hope others will join me. One thing I want to double-check is whether there will indeed be “creation” of ePub rather than from it. No misunderstanding here? The MobileRead post reads, “The next version of Mobi Creator and Mobigen will also support EPUB creation.” Not conversion from ePub? Meanwhile I’ve tweaked the post and headline, since I feel we need to double-check, given the importance of this apparent news and the fact I don’t see information about it elsewhere. No reflection on Nate or Mobi here—just a determination to make sure that the glad tidings are for real.

Update, 9:50 p.m.: Nate, too, will be checking to see if Mobi will in fact offer ePub creation tools in “the next version of Mobi Creator and Mobigen.” To his vast credit, Nate says his notes may have been wrong (here’s to honesty!). My hunch now is that the next Mobi tools won’t support ePub creation. But you never know. Let’s keep an open mind until we get the word form the company, which, of course, is welcome to use the TeleBlog comment area to clarify matters.