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This isn't a new issue. George Kerscher and I wrote a major essay on the topic seven(!) years ago entitled the Soundproof Book. In it, we pointed out the irony that the first generation of ebook readers being inaccessible to blind people. This irony continues: it's a terrible shame that Amazon (and other ebook device vendors) keeps putting out ebook products that are inaccessible to the blind! More on that in another essay. The essence of the Soundproof Book essay was the dueling moral high grounds: author's rights vs. the right to access. Since these are both generally good from society's standpoint, how do you handle the conflict between them?

Amazon's Kindle, the first eBook reader that has really started to catch on with the public, deals almost exclusively with eBooks that have DRM. According to Ian Fried, the vice president of Amazon Kindle, customers don't seem to mind: "We've had very few if any customer responses that the choice we made with DRM was a problem." But DRM could become a problem if the Kindle goes bust - then all those people who bought Kindle eBooks with DRM will have no way to read them because no other device can open the files. Beyond that, not everyone agrees that DRM is a good business strategy. Publishing consultant Michael Shatzkin says it's tough to make the case that file-sharing reduces sales. He cites science fiction writer Cory Doctorow who, he says, "does the best he can to give away as much of his content as possible." And by giving it away, Shatzkin says, Doctorow's sales have skyrocketed.

Here's the world's shortest, fairest, and simplest licence agreement: "Don't violate copyright law." If I had my way, every digital download from the music in the iTunes and Amazon MP3 store, to the ebooks for the Kindle and Sony Reader, to the games for your Xbox, would bear this - and only this - as its licence agreement. "Don't violate copyright law" has a lot going for it, but the best thing about it is what it signals to the purchaser, namely: "You are not about to get screwed."

# Free and open source software under GPLv3 # Multi-platform: runs on Windows, Linux and Mac # Full Unicode support: everything you see in Sigil is in UTF-16 # Full EPUB spec support # WYSIWYG editing # Multiple Views: Book View, Code View and Split View ...

The Coalition's mission statement says, "Sadly, the Authors Guild does not support equal access for us. The Guild has told us that to read their books with text-to-speech we must either submit to a special registration system (that not all may qualify for and that would expose disability information to all future eBook reader manufacturers) and prove our disabilities -- or pay extra." (...) The Guild issued a statement following the protests, explaining its position: "The Authors Guild will gladly be a forceful advocate for amending contracts to provide access to voice-output technology to everyone. We will not, however, surrender our members' economic rights to Amazon or anyone else. The leap to digital has been brutal for print media generally, and the economics of the transition from print to e-books do not look as promising as many assume. Authors can't afford to start this transition to digital by abandoning rights." If the guild is trying to gain sympathy, it will have a very difficult time when it pits "economic rights" against civil rights.

Tue, 08/04/2009 - 14:06 - marc The native format for Stanza is ePub, which is the Open eBook standard from the International Digital Publishing Forum (http://www.idpf.org/). ePub is supported in Stanza Desktop, iPhone, and iPod Touch, as well as in Adobe Digital Editions and the next generation of e-ink readers like the Sony Reader (PRS-505).

Unless Amazon embraces open standards, the Kindle's lead will become a very short story.