Paper books may be low tech, but no one will tell you how and where you can read them.
For many people, the problem with electronic books is that they come loaded with just those kinds of restrictions. Digital books bought from Amazon.com, for example, can be read only on Amazon's Kindle device or its iPhone software. Some restrictions on the use of e-books are likely to remain a fact of life. But some publishers and consumer electronics makers are aiming to give e-book buyers more flexibility by rallying around a single technology standard for the books. That would also help them counter Amazon, which has taken an early lead in the nascent market.
Last week, Sony Electronics, which sells e-book devices under the Reader brand, announced that by the end of the year it will sell digital books only in the ePub format, an open standard created by a group including publishers like Random House and HarperCollins.
Sony will also scrap its proprietary anticopying software in favour of technology from the software maker Adobe that restricts how often e-books can be shared or copied. After the change, books bought from Sony's online store will be readable not just on its own device but on the growing constellation of other readers that support ePub. Those include the Plastic Logic eReader, a thin device that has been in development for nearly a decade and is expected to go on sale early next year. Steve Haber, president of Sony's digital reading unit, says there is going to be a proliferation of different reading devices, with different features and capabilities and prices for a different set of consumer requirements.
''If people are going to this e-book shopping mall, they are going to want to shop at all the stores, and not just be required to shop at one store.''
Sony's move comes amid mounting concern about Amazon's market power in the budding category of electronic books. E-book sales in the United States hit a record $US14million ($A16.55 million) in June, a 136.2 percent increase from a year earlier, according to the Association of American Publishers.
Amazon does not divulge its e-book revenue, but analysts say it most likely accounted for a majority of those sales.
Amazon inadvertently demonstrated one potential consequence of e-book restrictions last month when it discovered that it had sold unauthorised copies of George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm and then removed the books from the Kindle libraries of people who had bought the novels. Amazon's chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, later apologised for the move, but not before advocates used the episode to rail against its limitations.
Holmes Wilson, campaigns manager of the Free Software Foundation says people need to remember when they buy books that come with digital rights management, ''they don't have the freedoms they normally would have with a book''. The foundation has obtained the signatures of nearly 4000 authors and tech pundits on a petition saying Amazon's anticopying software was a ''clear threat to the free exchange of ideas.''
Companies like Sony and Adobe do not want to abandon anticopying measures, fearing that piracy of books would run rampant. Rather, they want to push the e-book industry toward common standards to avoid a replay of Apple's domination of the digital music business.
Early this decade, Apple sold music from its iTunes store that was protected by its own FairPlay software and could be played only on the iPod. The result was what is known as ''lock-in''. Apple built up extraordinary market power and leverage to dictate terms to the major music labels on matters like the price of digital songs. Then, as now, second-tier players banded together to promote the increased flexibility and choice that open standards gave to consumers.
''If the business terms and conditions end up being dictated to publishers by one bookseller who has a chokehold over the value chain, publishers are going to have a hard time staying profitable,'' Bill McCoy, general manager for Adobe's digital publishing business, says.
For Sony, which introduced its Reader devices more than a year before the Kindle arrived, the move to open formats is part of a strategy to make up lost ground.
Sony recently introduced two new, less expensive devices and announced it was dropping its price for new releases and best sellers to $US9.99 ($A11.85).
Later in the year, the company will begin selling a third Reader that will, like the Kindle, allow users to buy e-books wirelessly. Amazon, for its part, believes it can go it alone, without embracing industry standards. An Amazon spokesman would not comment for this article, but Bezos has said before that his goal was to ''make Kindle books available on as many hardware devices as possible''.
That suggests it will soon introduce versions of its Kindle software for the Palm Pre and other reading devices.
Allen Weiner, an analyst at the technology research firm Gartner, says there is one more company that must declare its allegiance to either an open or closed world for e-books: Apple.
If, as expected, Apple soon introduces a tablet computer that can function as a reading device, and if it embraces an open standard like ePub, Amazon will have to reconsider its closed approach, Weiner said.
New York Times
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