This is going to help sales of the Nook. Not. It might help piracy, though. “Want to borrow a book from a friend? PIRATE IT.”

Saw it on the news with my wife this morning … no interest from her.

And straight from the horse’s mouth:
http://ebooks.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/ebooks.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=133&p_created=1250171533&p_sid=l8fZB5Lj&p_accessibility=0&p_redirect=&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X2J5PSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9NCw0JnBfcHJvZHM9MSw5JnBfY2F0cz0mcF9wdj0yLjkmcF9jdj0mcF9wYWdlPTEmcF9zZWFyY2hfdGV4dD1lcHVi&p_li=&p_topview=1#prevPurch

What will happen to previous purchases from the eBook Store from Sony, or to additional purchases that occur before the conversion?

Books that have been purchased from Sony’s eBook store in Broad Band eBook format (BBeB) will continue to work on existing devices. When the store is converted, customers will be able to re-download their previously purchased books in EPUB format.

Current Reader owners can continue to purchase and read their BBeB eBooks in the meantime.

And, of course, we listen to music in the background, while we do other things – drive, pay the bills, cook and eat, relax, do chores, even while reading. On the other hand, reading is a dedicated exercise – you cannot read (well) while you are doing other things.

This is another reason why the iPod model is not as applicable to ebook readers as people try to make them.

As for DRM, I think it’s just the nature of the beast. There is no model like the live concert event for writers to get revenue, to use their books freely distributed to promote. The books are their revenue stream, and as long as people can steal content, they will try. If the quality if what you are reading is not as important as the inclusion of DRM, bully for you, but I am very discriminating about what I read, and it often is material that is copyrighted and valuable to its author. If I want it electronically, I’ll suffer the DRM, but know that I’m likely to read it only once anwyay, so it’s not as big a deal as music and video DRM.

But my point isn’t so much to argue history, or even suggest that every reader should be required to read every format (any more than MP3 players should need to deal with multiple formats)

… my point is that I think that B&N should recognize that they are entering a market with hardware now, but already have software and content – and therefore customers – from eReader / Fictionwise. And since many of those customers have been around for several years, I feel that B&N should have been ready with an answer about how they would support existing customers …

… and if the answer is ‘we are not’, then we need to hold them to it, to make it clear that all of these new book readers are no better than the old MSN music, and when B&N decided to stop supporting them, all of this content will be gone – as through their actions they will have shown that they have no regard for their customers or their money. Of course, if they provide an ‘eReader import utility’ that will convert a book purchased in eReader into a book in their B&N account, then all is good

@Michael: But reading ebooks on your PDAs for years is kind of the exception, not the rule; the average B&N shopper probably didn’t know they could do that until at the earliest the iPhone, or even this week when the nook was announced. For the non-tech friendly group, books come in paper form and that’s it. But ebooks are slowly creeping into that world, and it’s content, not hardware, that is the driving force IMHO…we shall see…

@Haesslich: I didn’t know that about the LRX—>ADEPT transition. Do you have a link to Sony’s promise to allow people to download books in ePub after they purchased in LRX? I’m guessing a lot of our readers here didn’t know that…

As for Sony… well, they’re improving, slowly. In some areas. With some things. The eReader hardware (PRS-300, PRS-600) DOES support ADEPT DRM, and ePub, which means they can read books from non-Sony Ebook Store sites. They’re also transitioning over all the LRX-format books to ADEPT, and have promised (so far) to allow people who downloaded their books in LRX format the ability to download Adobe Digital Edition versions of the same books in ePub. Although with the current method of lending that they’ve stated they’re using (you can loan a book out to one person, but in turn lose access to it on your current device), it’s both a step forward… and a step back – on the one hand, they haven’t crippled it the way Microsoft did with their ‘social music’ on Zune (three plays of a song, or three days)… although the way they’re tying people to their own platform (I’m going to have to assume that this isn’t using Overdrive technology, which ePub already supports), which in turn suggests they’re going to go proprietary with their DRM.

Again.

But as I noted before, I am amongst those who have been reading ‘eBooks’ for nearly 20 years, and have multiple file formats and have bought from many stores. What has constantly happened is that new formats come with new DRM and won’t work with old formats and eventually the vendor drops support for the older format, and you are stuck with useless books or using a ‘crack’ tool to extract your file.

The reason that is relevant is the non-answer regarding eReader. Maybe it is my recent experience with the Sony PSP Go and their terrible treatment of existing customers … but there is absolutely no way they couldn’t have thought about this, and therefore I assume it is their intention to screw over those of us with existing libraries of DRM-infected eReader & Fictionwise content in the hopes they can sell us the same book twice.