Overview of How eBooks Work.
Basically, all eBooks work the
same. You go to an Internet-based bookseller, order a book, download it
into your "reader" whatever it might be, and enjoy
reading. The issue is keeping people from then emailing hundreds if
not thousands of copies to everybody else. Thus the concept of
Digital Rights Management (DRM) comes to the forefront. The way DRM is
accomplished is for the bookseller to download the eBook to a
registered reader only. The procedure is basically as follows in the case
of laptop-based readers.
You go to the website of the
maker of the reader (see examples on How to
Order), and download the reader software into your laptop or workstation.
You register the reader. There
are various ways of doing this, but the key in all of them is that
they take some unique information about your computer and send it back
to the registration site. In the case of both Acrobat eBook Reader
and Microsoft Reader, they use the volume header ID of your system
disk as well as other information such as CPU model. This means that
you cannot reformat your system drive should you have a disk problem, let
alone replace it, without having problems with your eBooks.
You go to the bookseller's
site, order your book, and when it is ready for download, you
must download it to the laptop or workstation that has the registered
reader in it. The downloaded eBook is then stamped with a code that is used by the reader to decide if you have a legitimate copy of the
book or not.
There are many detailed variations in the above between the Adobe Acrobat Reader and the Microsoft
Reader. We urge you to go to their respective websites and read about them. Generally, as far as DRM is concerned, both Microsoft and Adobe
do a thorough job of preventing the improper copying of
eBooks.
The Palm DRM depends on just how much you
trust those you give the eBook to -- an interesting DRM concept (see
below).