Let’s call them A-books

The iPad will apparently be using a proprietary Apple copy protection for its electronic books, according to an LA Times report which cites “anonymous publishing sources”.  This means that you won’t be able to read your Kindle or Barnes & Noble e-books on the iPad or your iPad books on other devices.

We should really refer to these products as a-books rather than e-books because they’re more like applications than books: they’re tied to a particular platform and vendor.  ”a-books” could also coincidentally stand for Apple-Books, Amazon-Books, or Adobe-Books, covering the three major flavors of DRM in use with digital books.  DRM stands for  ”digital rights management” and is (in all these cases) a kind of encryption used to prevent unauthorized copying and distribution.  The Sony and Nook e-readers both use DRM from Adobe Systems.  It isn’t yet known what kind of DRM will be used by Google Editions (though it might be interesting).

This isn’t really new, since most e-books already come with DRM which ties them to a particular platform, but there seemed to be some hopeful convergence on Adobe’s DRM with its adoption by multiple vendors, leaving Amazon as the odd man out with the proprietary DRM.  (Of course, the reliance on Adobe isn’t ideal either).  However, Apple’s decision changes all of this.

The iPad’s book reading application will reportedly use Apple’s own FairPlay DRM, which they use for movies and TV shows and (until recently) music.  This is distinct from the Adobe DRM used on Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the Sony readers, and other products.  It is also distinct from the DRM used on Amazon’s Kindle, though the Kindle also has an entirely different e-book format altogether, rather than the ePub format which everyone else seems to be using.

It will be interesting to see what happens to the existing iPhone reader applications, especially the offerings from Kindle and Barnes & Noble (and more interesting ones from other sources).  If Apple lets these applications work on the iPad, you will be able to read your Kindle and Barnes & Noble books on your iPad, just not with the native reading application.  It would also let creative developers come up with even better ways of using the iPad as an e-reader.

However, Apple has an explicit policy of barring applications which replace core functionality.  That was one explanation of Apple’s rejection of the “Google Voice” application which got some anti-trust attention last year.  It is also the reason that alternative web browsers are not generally available in the App Store.  Will this policy bar those kinds of applications not that there is new native functionality?  It would be a questionable move on Apple’s part, but certainly conceivable.  One interesting move would be to provide a way that those applications could connect to the native iPad “bookshelf” and to offer/require that purchasing on the iPad happen through Apple’s in-app purchase infrastructure (where Apple gets a cut).

In the long run, there’s a slightly more than philosophical argument that a given product is not “really” a book (with its connotations of durability and portability) if it’s tied to a device or vendor.  If that’s the case (and books continue to exist), these a-books are a transitional form awaiting either some kind of open and portable DRM (not an oxymoron) or the evolution of publishing beyond dependence on DRM (as has happened in music).  In this scenario, there’s a chance that early adopters (like myself) will end up as either victims (losing purchases to vendor evolution) or criminals (breaking the DRM on books we’ve purchased so we can read them on different devices).   But I’m hoping for a better outcome!

Advertisement