Sony announced their new e-readers today, and they represent another nail in the coffin of epub. You see, there’s one detail about the new devices that most people will miss: they won’t be using the new DRM (like B&N). It gets worse, actually. The current models won’t be getting an update any time soon.
This is the death-knell for Epub because today was Sony’s one big device announcement for the year. That means that all of Sony’s e-readers will continue to use the Adept DRM, and that the bifurcation of Adobe Epub will continue for at least another year.
I lost all hope today that the 2 Adobe Epub DRMs might combine into one. Since we can’t tell if it will ever happen, it’s about time we faced the fact that we actually have 3 Epub formats, not one. From now on I’ll refer to them as Adept-Epub, B&N-Epub, and Apple-Epub.
It’s times like this that I wonder if Adobe is trying to lose to Amazon.
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Save for B&N, all the other shops uses drm. Boooks sold in france, for exemble, are all adept ePub. So, no support for adept DRM , no sell.
Here in france, ePub is far from from dead
Sony’s updated Readers are too little too late. I’m actually in the process of jumping ship from my Sony PRS505 to a Kindle3!
The point is that Adobe swears the ADEPT SDK with B&N-DRM support shipped ages ago and that the choice to include it or not is up to the hardware vendors.
Well, the vendors are *choosing* not to include it.
The result is Nooks can get ePub ebooks from the generic Adept stores and the B&N bookstore but other Adept eink readers can’t access the B&N store.
Now, since the Jetbook and Pandigital Novel *do* feature B&N-DRM support, the thought comes to mind that maybe B&N-DRM support is *not* free or B&N is simply not licensing their *store access* to all comers.
Either way, whether due to Adobe, B&N, or the hardware vendors, it is clear commercial ePub is in fact triply-forked.
As for ePub being alive or dead in specific regional markets… (shrug).
Last I looked, MS Reader DRM’ed LITs are still readily available in several markets, including the US, even for new releases. Doesn’t make it terribly relevant as the overall world market moves on, though. Ditto for eReader format. Think of them as zombies; not dead but hardly healthy.
With Blio and XMDF starting to deploy rich-content ebooks worldwide, Adobe-ePub is at risk of ending up as a zombie format, marginalized by the bookstore-driven formats at the low-end and outclassed by the new rich-content formats at the high-end.
LIT books are beautiful. I weep over MS not supporting it. LIT’s also very easy to crack. I’ll buy that if my only other choice is EPUB~3 and/or PDF.
Why do so many people neglect to mention Fr-epub. the original unfettered standard? It is well-supported and commercially available. The fact that so many no-cost books use it makes it hard to collect statistics, I suppose. But it is still there.
Because if the DRM formats go down they will take the DRM free with it.
How, by magic? There is a tonne of content available and wide support. Come on, palmdoc is still supported. I don’t think plain vanilla epub is disappearing for a while yet.
blio uses google books for free which are in epub format once downloaded it converts and keeps the epub sources, it converts them into xps format from the epub format, its like printing epub to xps microsoft format you can open these in xps files in windows 7 with the xps viewer included besides blio reader, and you could always print to pdf format, its not a true drm format as far as I can tell at least for the free books and thats all I am using it too read is free books
Isn’t Blio *content* built off XPS rather than ePub?
Correct Blio supports XPS.
I heard it also supports ePub but clearly the rich content direction is via XPS.
Blio does not support Epub.