E-book publishers apparently, just love DRM

Remember how before the iPod came out, playing anything on Windows Media Player was so unpredictable? It would frequently talk about DRM. And then, Sony made that terrible DRM mistake of putting a DRM virus on their CDs. Well, thanks to Steve Jobs, we no longer have DRM to worry about when it comes to music. But e-books are a completely different matter. The e-book publishers are running amok with DRM madness these days.

Let's say that you have a Sony Reader today. It's working just fine, but one day, you let it slip and it drops into the bathtub. It does work somewhat, but not really dependably. So you decide to go with the Kindle, instead. Now at this point, you will bump against a minor copyright glitch that brings you to the bad old days of DRM all over again. How do you transfer the books you have stored in your Sony Reader to your Kindle?

The books you buy for the Sony Reader are in a proprietary format. They won't open in the Kindle. To do that, you have to have to hack into those Sony e-books with special software. Apple's iBooks are in their own format, Amazon's books are in their own format – it's just a really unfortunate situation.

And even if you do buy a book that's in a universal format, they are still going to do something to it so doesn't open on another manufacturer's device.

Customers can get really outraged when this kind of thing happens. They feel that they've bought their books, and they have a right to read on whatever device they choose. The e-book publishers see things differently. They feel that of course, if it's just you reading your book on different devices, it should be fine. But how do they know if you aren't lending it to someone else? What if the new Kindle you just bought was not your Kindle, but belonged instead to a friend? How does Amazon know? If they let this happen, before long, people just be making copies and getting their books to all their friends.

Basically, when you buy an e-book Reader, you're locked to that format for avery long time. Perhaps for life. If you want to move to an e-book reader by another company, you may have to either find a reliable way to hack into your old reader and get all the books out so that they will open in the new reader, or you will have to just say goodbye to all the books that you havebought so far. It can be a terrible situation.