Re: [libreplanet-discuss] e-book Readers

[Anthony Papillion]

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 11:57 AM,  <postmaster@customer-opinions.net> 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