Ebook Copy Protection Confusion eases as Kindle Partners with Apple for New Ipad Reader App.
For e-book readers, the future looks confusing in a market where copy 
protection is highly fragmented. Buying an e-book does not currently offer the reader the same level of freedom – the same level of ownership of that bit of intellectual property, as buying a paperback. Buy a paperback and the copy protection is simple. You own that one copy. Read it in the bath, read it on the beach, lend it to your friends: it’s yours for life to do with as you wish, just as long as you don’t make copies of it.
The same cannot be said of copy protection in the world of ebooks at the moment. An Amazon Kindle ebook for example, is tied, by DRM to the Kindle ereader. The copy protection ensures that you cannot read your Kindle ebook on any other device without paying an additional fee to convert your content to a different format. From the consumers point of view this could be seen as overly restrictive copy protection.
Ebooks and ereaders are a fast developing technology. It’s a bit like a very high speed version of what has happened in the recording industry over the last 20 years. With music we have moved from vinyl, to tape, to CD to MP3. Because copy protection hasn’t been that secure (in fact copy protection was often non-existent) it has been easy enough for people to transfer their music from one format to the next. With ebooks the copy protection is much more sophisticated, and the technology is moving much faster. So if you buy your ebook collection from Amazon as Kindles, and then Kindle looses the ebook race and becomes a dormant or obsolete technology, you are going to have all sorts of problems with the copy protection when you want to to transfer your collection to a new ereader platform.
When Steve Jobs announced the introduction of the Apple bookstore at the launch of the ipad earlier this year alarm bells must have gone off in the heads of many ebook devotees. Were we to have yet another ebook format, with its own copy protection, incompatible with other ereader devices.
But this week it seems that things may not be as bad as we had thought, as both Amazon and Barnes and Noble have announced that they will be releasing Kindle and Nook reader apps for the ipad.
So for the consumer worried by the potential copy protection problems posed by “getting in to bed with” one particular brand of ereader, the ipad could well offer the way forward, as it will overcome these copy protection worries by offering compatibility witha range of ebook formats.
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