Chapter 6. DRM & Lock-in
It’s Time for a Unified eBook Format and the End of DRM
By Joe Wikert
Imagine buying a car that locks you into one brand of fuel. A new BMW, for example, that only runs on BMW gas. There are plenty of BMW gas stations around, even a few in your neighborhood, so convenience isn’t an issue. But if one of those other gas stations offers a discount, a membership program, or some other attractive marketing campaign, you can’t participate. You’re locked in with the BMW gas stations.
This could never happen, right? Consumers are too smart to buy into something like this. Or are they? After all, isn’t that exactly what’s happening in the ebook world? You buy a dedicated ebook reader like a Kindle or a NOOK and you’re locked in to that company’s content. Part of this problem has to do with ebook formats (e.g., EPUB or Mobipocket) while another part of it stems from publisher insistence on the use of digital rights management (DRM). Let’s look at these issues individually.
Platform lock-in
I’ve often referred to it as Amazon’s not-so-secret formula: Every time I buy another ebook for my Kindle, I’m building a library that makes me that much more loyal to Amazon’s platform. If I’ve invested thousands or even hundreds of dollars in Kindle-formatted content, how could I possibly afford to switch to another reading platform?
It would be too inconvenient to have part of my library in Amazon’s Mobipocket format and the rest in EPUB. Even though I could read both on a tablet (e.g., ...
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