Inspirational Technology

Another Look at eBooks

I just finished reading my first complete eBook. It was a free book I downloaded from the Baen Free Library. I downloaded the book in Microsoft Reader format. Overall it was a good experience. I read the book partly on my Pocket PC and partly on my Mac via a Microsoft Remote Desktop connection to a Windows XP laptop. Unfortunately. a Mac version of Microsoft Reader doesn't exist.

The book I read was Wizard's Bane. The book itself was enjoyable. It won't be a classic of the fantasy genre, but it was good enough that I would read other books in the series. What's more important though, Baen is a very forward looking publisher and has chosen to release a number of their books for free in DRM free formats. They also sell books that I believe are also DRM free. According to this article on Planet eBook this has been a very successful strategy for not only increasing sales of paper books, but also providing one of the few eBook sales channels that actually makes money. I know I certainly will be more likely to buy books from this company and being able to sample their authors is a very good thing.

Unfortunately the rest of the eBook picture may not be so rosy. In particular it appears to me that the DRM situation is pretty grim. There are three major eBook formats: Microsoft Reader, Adobe Reader and Palm Reader and a number of other less common formats. For sales of books all support some form of DRM and the DRM in the Microsoft and Adobe formats seems to be horrible for usability. For instance as I was reading my book I read it on two completely different devices and it isn't at all clear to me whether the DRM encumbered formats would have even allowed me to do that. From what I can tell they try to lock the book to a particular device, which if that's actually the case is totally unacceptable from my perspective. From what I can tell Palm offers the best compromise, but I need to look deeper to be sure. I've become very interested in the eBook idea so I'm going to experiment a little more and buy a couple books in different formats to get a better idea of what the process is like.

Currently I'm reading The Hacker Crackdown, another free eBook that I downloaded in Palm Reader format from Palm Digital Media. Again this file has no DRM associated with it so the experience has been pleasurable. i've been reading it mostly on my Pocket PC and some with the native Mac OS X Palm Reader client.

Really, simply the fact that I have to so thoroughly consider the impact of the various DRM technologies presents a barrier. Maybe this is the cost of being a technologist and caring too much about how things work, but the experience of purchased eBooks right now just leaves an unpleasant taste in my mouth. I'll write more once I have more first hand experience.