You don’t need to sit down, we’re not about to hit you with any shocking news, but a recent BookExpo America convention has given publishers the chance to air out their laundry list of complaints. Seriously, do these guys ever have anything positive to say? Now they’ve managed to pinpoint a flaw in the Kindle and iPad’s resounding success, identifying the two ebook reading platforms as closed, and expressing a yearning for a universal and open format that all books can be published and consumed on. Of course, they wouldn’t be publishers if they didn’t also lust after robust DRM measures, which might explain why they’re not roundly supporting the readily available EPUB format. It has DRM options, but perhaps they’re not gnarly enough for the dudes responsible for bringing us the psychological horror of the Twilight series. We still don’t like the suggestion that the people, Amazon primarily, who popularized this market should just open it up out of the goodness of their own hearts — maybe we would if publishers ever showed themselves capable of doing similarly noble things.
Kaleidescape‘s just announced another line of high end home entertainment products — this time it’s the M300 and M500 Blu-ray players. The M500 also boasts Blu-ray copying abilities, too — allowing you to import Blu-rays, DVDs and CDs onto your server at home. In an interesting decision, Kaleidescape will require that the physical Blu-ray disc be present for playback from the server — which, you may be thinking, rather defeats the purpose, doesn’t it? Pretty much. Thankfully, Kaleidescape’s got a disc loader in the works which will allow you to keep a “large number” of discs ready in the system for faster loading. The loader itself isn’t expected to be ready for retail until the first half of next year, but you can grab the M300 and the M500 beginning May 18th, with the M300 running $2,495 and the M500 at $3,995. The full press release follows.
The Motion Picture Association of America has been trying to get a waiver for the FCC Selectable Output Control (SoC) ban since it went into effect — the ability to only allow content to flow from a HDCP protected HDMI port. Up until now there has been lots of debate and no action. The bad news is that the MPAA can now use SoC to protect high value content, the good news is the FCC really locked down exactly when it can be used. Basically any movie that’s never been released on disc (DVD or Blu-ray) can be protected with SoC for 90 days. The reason the FCC granted this partial waiver was because the content affected isn’t currently available to cable and satellite anyways — in other words consumers who own older HDTVs, without HDMI ports, don’t currently expect access to these movies. So for those with older hardware nothing changes, and for those with the latest and greatest, you’ll be able to rent newer movies from home. And for everyone else there’s the HDfury2 — no, they’ll never learn that DRM is a big waste of time and money. Full waiver after the jump.
Samsung Electronics said Tuesday that it has partnered with Microsoft to apply Microsoft’s PlayReady DRM technology across a “broad range of its consumer products,” including mobile phones, digital video players, televisions and other device offerings.
Samsung said it expects to migrate from Windows Media Digital Rights Management to PlayReady across its communications and entertainment products worldwide by 2012.
PlayReady is Microsoft’s digital-rights-management solution, that Microsoft has bundled with Windows 7. SilverLight 2-based online content can be protected by PlayReady, which can be licensed for servers, applications, or client devices.
Samsung said that it would use the technology to protect content, and allow it to be accessed on a range of devices, most likely storing it in the cloud.
“Consumers are increasingly interested in accessing the content they love where they want and when they want,” said Dr. W. P. Hong, executive vice president of the Mobile Communications Business at Samsung Electronics. “PlayReady is an integral technology component that will help us to deliver on our vision for connected entertainment and bring to life the kinds of seamless entertainment experiences that take full advantage of the digital medium.”
If you live in India, our story was correct — your mobile subscription music service will be called “Ovi,” and no longer carry the weight of the cumbersome Comes with Music branding — but we’re hearing that in other Nokia territories, including the UK, that’s not quite the case. Nokia UK told Pocket-lint that while the company’s online music store will indeed be renamed “Ovi Music” across all 22 territories this year, the Comes with Music service is here (and there) to stay. To tell you the truth, though, we’re not that interested in the fate of a brand name. We’d prefer if Nokia made a more ballsy move — like discontinuing their service’s most controversial feature, Comes with DRM.
We can’t say that we’ll miss the awkwardly named Comes with Music service branding from Nokia. Of course, we’re making the assumption that India’s recently christened Ovi Music Unlimited store will be making its way global as Nokia continues to tighten up its service offerings in the race to compete in the era of modern smartphones. It’s certainly consistent with the new Ovi Music naming convention so why not. Otherwise, it looks like nothing else about the all you can eat (for a year) music offering has changed — particularly the DRM that locks “your” music to your PC or CWM OMU handsets for life-ish.
“We use the epub format: It is the most popular open book format in the world.” That’s how Steve Jobs announced the iPad. And wow, that sounds like all the ebooks you own will just work on anything. Um, no.
The idea of an open ebook format that works on any reader sounds nice. Buy it from any source, read it on any device. In a few cases, it’s true, and that open format thing can work for you. But, in reality, right now? You’re pretty much going to be stuck reading books you buy for one device or ecosystem in that same little puddle, thanks to DRM. And well, Amazon.
The Hardware
Okay, so the easiest way to put this in perspective is to quickly list what formats the major ebook readers support. (Why these four? Well, they’re the ones due to sell over 2 million units this year, except for Barnes & Noble‘s, which we’re including as a direct contrast to Kindle just because.)
• Amazon Kindle: Kindle (AZW, TPZ), TXT, MOBI, PRC and PDF natively; HTML and DOC through conversion • Apple iPad: EPUB, PDF, HTML, DOC (plus iPad Apps, which could include Kindle and Barnes & Noble readers) • Barnes & Noble Nook: EPUB, PDB, PDF • Sony Reader: EPUB, PDF, TXT, RTF; DOC through conversion
You’ll notice a pattern there: Everybody (except for Amazon) supports EPUB as their primary ebook format. Turns out, there’s a good reason for that.
EPUB, the MP3 of Book Publishing
The reason just about every ebook uses EPUB is because the vast majority of the publishing industry has decided that EPUB is the industry standard file format for ebooks. It’s a free and open standard, based on open specifications. The successor to Open eBook, it’s maintained by the International Digital Publishing Forum, which has a pretty lengthy list of members, both of the dead-tree persuasion (HarperCollins and McGraw Hill) and of the technological kind (Adobe and HP). Google’s million-book library is all in EPUB too.
It’s based on XML—extensible markup language—which you see all over the place, from RSS to Microsoft Office, ’cause it lays out rules for storing information. And it’s actually made up of a three open components: Open Publication Structure basically is about the formatting, how it looks; Open Packaging Format is how it’s tied together using navigation and metadata; and Open Container Format is a zip-based container format for the file, where you get the .epub file extension. When you toss those three components together, you have the EPUB ebook format.
While we’ve only see EPUB on black-and-white e-ink-based readers so far, like Sony’s Readers or the B&N Nook, the capabilities of the file format go way “beyond those types of things,” says Nick Bogaty, Adobe’s senior development manager for digital publishing. Unlike PDF, which is a fixed page, EPUB provides reflowable text, a page layout that can adjust itself to a device’s screen-size. With EPUB, content producers can use cascading style sheets, embedded fonts, and yes, embed multimedia files like color images, SVG graphics, interactive elements, even full video—the kind of stuff Steve promised in the iPad keynote. So, we haven’t seen the full extent of EPUB’s capabilities, and won’t, until at least April 3 and presumably much later. Even if the books you buy from Apple iBook store worked on other devices—and as you will soon see, there’s little chance of that—don’t count on the coolest stuff, like video, to be somehow compatible with current-generation black-and-white e-ink readers.
D-D-D-DRM!
But let’s not get too excited seeing the words “free” and “open” so much in conjunction with EPUB. It’s like MP3 or AAC, and not only because it’s become a semi-universal industry standard. Make no mistake, these files can be totally unencrypted and unmanaged, or they can be wrapped up in any kind of digital rights management a distributor wants.
So far, according to Bogaty, the DRM every EPUB distributor currently uses is Adobe Content Server, which conveniently also wraps around PDF files. Sony and Barnes & Noble both use it on their readers, though since Adobe’s DRM doesn’t allow for sharing books between accounts, B&N actually uses a slightly custom version, and manages the Nook’s lending feature using their own backend. (Adobe is working on a sharing provision.) It does, however, support expiration, which is how Sony’s vaunted library lending feature works.
The plus side of all this compatability that it’s actually possible to move files from a Sony Reader to a Nook, using Adobe Digital Editions to authorize the transfer. (Though according to some reviewers, that would be like moving pelts from a dead horse to a rotting bear.)
Apple, on the other hand, chose EPUB as the preferred file format, but will be wrapping DRM’d files from its iBooks Store in the FairPlay DRM, which is used to protect movies and apps (and formerly music) in the iTunes Store. As always, expect them to be the only company using it.
(There’s a precursor to EPUB’s dilemma: Audible downloads. You can buy Audible audiobooks from an enormous number of sources, but the ones you buy from iTunes aren’t going to play on any other Audible-capable device, no matter how many logos they slap on the box.)
You may be thinking that it’s just a matter of time before ebook stores all go DRM free. That would be wishful thinking at best. While ebooks might seem a lot like digital music circa 2005, you can’t rip a book, so the only way to get a bestseller on your reader is to buy it legally, or to steal it. It’s pretty much that simple. There will be free books, there will be unencrypted books, and the torrents will rage with bestsellers (as they already do). Still, DRM’s gonna be a hard fact of life with every major bookstore, since they’re going to at least try to keep you from stealing it. You don’t see Hollywood giving up DRM, do you?
Kindle, Barnes & Noble, and How The Dead PDA Business Affects the Live Ebook War
Did you know that Amazon owns Mobipocket, which mainly targeted ebooks for PDAs and smartphones, and had its own file format that with roots in the PalmDOC format? The Mobipocket format, consequently, has two extensions: .mobi and .prc. I bring it up, not because you should care about Mobipocket—you really shouldn’t—but because the Kindle’s preferred AZW format is actually a very slightly modified version of MOBI, which is why it’s easy to convert files from one format to the other. Unprotected AZW files can be renamed to the MOBI or PRC format and simply work with MobiPocket readers.
The problem with Mobipocket is that it’s not a very capable format, since it was originally designed for ancient-ass PDAs and all. So there’s another special Amazon format that’s a little more mysterious, called Topaz, which is more capable than MOBI, with powers like the ability to have embedded fonts. It’s used for fewer books, and carries the file suffix .tpz or .azw1. For what it’s worth, some people complain books in the Topaz format are less responsive than the standard AZW files. In truth, none of this may matter if and when the Super Kindle arrives.
In terms of DRM, Amazon uses its own DRM on both formats. Both have been cracked, though it apparently took longer with Topaz. This may be good news for pirates, but matters not at all from a cross-platform point of view, since that format is completely proprietary, and nothing but the Kindle or Kindle software will read it anyway.
But the old PDA legacy crap doesn’t stop with Amazon. Palm once owned its own ebook platform, which it sold to a company who called it eReader. Eventually, the format and the software platform came to be owned by Barnes & Noble. I’m only dragging you into this because Barnes & Noble actually still sells many books in this format, even while they transition to the more popular and “open” EPUB format. You can spot an eReader format because the file ends in .pdb—but you only see that after you bought the damn thing. That is to say, even if you care enough about formats to go with the reader that supports the one you like, you still might get stuck with a limited, if not completely proprietary, stack of books.
PDF, I Still Love You
In comparison to EPUB, PDF is simple. Developed over 15 years ago by Adobe, the portable document format has been an open standard since 2008. You’re probably pretty damn familiar with it, but the main thing about it versus these other formats is that everything is fixed—fonts, graphics, text, etc.—so it looks the same everywhere, versus the reflowable format that adjusts to the screen size. Hence, Amazon offers PDF without zoom on its Kindle DX, which has the screen real estate to (usually) not muck it up too much. With smaller screens than the PDF’s native size, it requires some pan-and-zoom voodoo, and it still usually looks pretty disgusting.
Zoom issues notwithstanding, having a fixed format has advantages. For instance, a lot of “electronic newspapers” were transmitted via PDF back in the day, because it retained their design. It’s really nice for comics. (Consequently, you can bet scanned-comic piracy to explode when the iPad arrives, unless Marvel and DC come up with killer strategies to get their comics on a device that’s clearly begging for it.) Wikipedia covers a lot of the technical ground, surprisingly thoroughly, even if the usual Wiki caveats apply. As mentioned above, it can be protected with Adobe Content Server DRM, just like EPUB.
The Great Shiny Hope: Apps
The other path for digital publishers: Build an app to hold your books and magazines. This is the route magazines are taking, because they’re envisioning some fancy digital jujitsu. With Adobe AIR, which is what Wired and the NYT are using in various incarnations for their respective rags, they’re able to do more advanced layouts, more rich multimedia, Flash craziness, and other designer bling that EPUB can’t handle, says Adobe’s Bogarty. Also, importantly you can dynamically update content, like when new issues arrive, which you can’t really do with EPUB.
Interestingly, the publisher Penguin is alsotaking the app route for their books, building apps using web technologies like HTML5 for the iPad, so their books are in fact, way more like games and applications than mere books. So it’s another tack publishers could take.
But the app business can help with the openness of the big ebook file formats, too. Many people read Amazon’s proprietary formats on their iPhone, because Amazon wants to sell books, and Apple wants people to use apps. Barnes & Noble has a reader app, too; while not great, it at least somewhat helps get over the PDB/EPUB confusion. It’s pretty likely that these and many other ebook apps will turn up on the iPad, unless Jobs decides that they “duplicate” his “functionality.” Since iBooks itself is an app you have to download, it probably won’t be an issue. Here’s hoping.
The Upshot
The idea of an open ebook format that works on any reader sounds really nice. And in some cases, if you pay really really close attention, it’s true. That open format thing actually can work for you. But the reality? You’re pretty much going to be stuck with the books you buy in one device working only in that same ecosystem, or at least hoping and praying for an assortment of proprietary reader apps to appear on all your devices. Now, where’d I put that copy of Infinite Jest? Was it in my Kindle library, my B&N library or my iBooks library?
Still something you wanna know? Send questions about ebooks, bookies or horse heads here with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.
While not widely touted, Nokia’s Ovi Music store is on track to make Nokia’s music catalog DRM-free globally. This was first mentioned in December at Nokia’s Capital Market Days event. Keep in mind that we’re talking about Nokia’s a la carte music download service, not its all you can eat Comes with Music offering that lets you keep all the tracks you can download in the first year but locks them to a single Nokia handset and PC for life. Russia’s Ovi Music store was the first to go DRM-free back in November while adding single sign-on with other Ovi services during the revamp process. Now we’re hearing that India has quietly joined suit with its Nokia Music store becoming the DRM-free Ovi Music incarnation. Nokia is apparently focusing on growth markets first on its way to more western markets but it’s a good sign that its fair use debilitating DRM is on the way out — a good thing for consumers and a change, like free Ovi Maps, that makes Nokia handsets just a bit more attractive.
Well, it looks like anyone hoping that books on Apple’s iBookstore would be as DRM-free as music is on iTunes may be in for a bit of disappointment, as the Los Angeles Times is now reporting that Apple will be making its own FairPlay digital rights management available to any book publishers that wish to use it. Of course, that shouldn’t come as a huge surprise considering that Apple still uses FairPlay for movies and TV shows sold on iTunes — not to mention apps — and it even still technically supports it for music as well, although it’s pretty safe to assume Apple won’t be going back down that road anytime soon. For its part, Apple is unsurprisingly staying mum on the matter, but March is fast approaching, so we should know for sure soon enough.
Welcome to ‘This day in Engadget’, where we crack open the archives and take a whimsical look back at the memories and moments of our storied past. Please join us on this trip down random access memory lane.
On February 6th, 2007 Apple CEO Steve Jobs published his “Thoughts on Music” letter. iTunes was by then the major player in online distribution, and the iPod had become the widely recognized face of portable music. DRM was controversial and pretty much universally disdained, and Jobs took the opportunity to write a letter pinpointing what he thought were the three options moving forward in the digital music distribution model. Essentially, he felt Apple (and the rest of the music loving world) had three choices: stay the course (DRM intact), move to the company’s FairPlay licensing model, or envision a future which was DRM-free. Jobs made no bones about it: he and Apple hoped to “embrace” the end of DRM (under pressure from the EU, of course). Arguing that DRM hadn’t stopped piracy, he conveniently called for the major labels to license their music to Apple DRM-free. On January 9th of 2009, Apple did announce that some of the music in its iTunes store would be purchasable DRM-free, though it still makes use of FairPlay for apps and video. Jobs will have to continue fighting the good fight, we suppose.
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“We use the epub format: It is the most popular open book format in the world.” That’s how Steve Jobs announced the iPad. And wow, that sounds like all the ebooks you own will just work on anything. Um, no.
