On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 11:57 AM, <[email protected]> wrote: > > Recently I've been asked to advise people on prospective purchases of > e-book readers. Fathers day is fast approaching and in the UK Tesco (our > largest supermarket chain) are heavily promoting the Amazon Kindle...a dire > choice for any who would wish to avoid DRM and vendor lock in in general. > There are so many reasons why we ought not to support these devices I won't > bore you with a long list here.
<snip> Personally, I think education is required in this space more than recommending specific e-book readers. In fact, I don't think the e-book readers or even the epub format are the main problem. They are simply tools that publishers are using to restrict freedom. A publisher is perfectly capable of releasing a title in epub format through the Amazon Kindle store without all of the DRM as I understand it. Publishers don't because they're greedy. What's needed is to educate writers and publishers as to why DRM is bad and why releasing their titles without DRM would actually benefit them both financially and socially. Of course, we also need to support publishers who make this choice with more than just an 'atta boy!'; we need to support them financially just as we need to financially punish those publishers who restrict freedom by using DRM. If enough publishers reject DRM, it will go away. Look at what happened with Microsoft's PlayFair (I think that's what it was called). It just went away. It was a failure. Amazon and other e-book reader vendors who use DRM aren't likely to drop it as long as their publishers demand it. Installing custom ROMS isn't the answer as most non-technical people aren't going to do it. We have to start at the publisher level and work from there. As for your recommendations, how about recommending either the Kindle or the Nook and encouraging them (and showing them how) to purchase from sources that don't support DRM? Cheers, Anthony Papillion
