Our friend Jorgen dropped this link off to a story at Computerworld describing the ongoing attempt by eBook retailers to control how and where we read the eBooks they sell us.
The article exposes industry leaders tinkering with the once universal and open EPUB format so that it requires a password to access, in some cases, and in others arriving with a ‘hard cap’ on the number of other machines or devices we can read the eBooks on.
This kind of market manipulation just puts wind in the sails of digital pirates, who are known to require little justification to ‘crack’ locked content, and like to cloak their rebellious activities with notions of Robin Hood and ‘sticking it to the man.’
Pretending to embrace the open format is worse than using proprietary, yah?
