Comment by nicholassmith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nicholassmith | Hacker News Reader

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Apple was in a position where they could make demands on publishers, so they demanded to strip off DRM and away they went. It was nice gesture, although you're still using iTunes media files but still, they exerted their power for The Greater Good (we can argue about why Apple would do that, but it was good for us all).

If anyone can exert pressure on book publishers to ditch DRM, it's Amazon, but why would they? Aside from The Greater Good they've got themselves a nice little vendor lock in, and unlike Apple who was making money hand over fist with the iPod and using the iTunes store to help get consumers to start building digital libraries, Amazon isn't making staggering amounts of money on the Kindle and they really need people to stick on the platform.

Seems like a few publishers have seen sense regarding DRM (Tor and Angry Robot are the first two who spring to mind), so maybe they'll eventually wise up and start dropping the DRM requirement.

AAC is not a proprietary format ("iTunes media files" — it is to MP4 what MP3 is to MPEG). Other media players can and do support AAC if it has no DRM.

Amazon not only uses DRM but it uses a non-standard ebook format and its hardware does not support vanilla ePub (out of the box, you can download third party viewers to the Fire devices).

To go back to a comparison to Apple: iPods do play WAV and MP3 out of the box, and so does iTunes. The only non-standard media format Apple pushed (Apple lossless) it has mad free and open. Apple's book reader supports ePub out of the box. (Apple does push its own enhancements to ePub for interactive textbooks, but it has done these in the "correct" way.)

> AAC is not a proprietary format ("iTunes media files" — it is to MP4 what MP3 is to MPEG). Other media players can and do support AAC if it has no DRM.

Both AAC & MP3 are patent encumbered and require licenses for implementation.

You are of course correct, but (a) that's not what the GP was implying since most non iTunes music players and all significant non-iTunes stores support MP3, (b) it doesn't matter to most users, and (c) Ogg Vorbis is only unencumbered to the extent that is too insignificant to represent a useful lawsuit target.

As for (c), AOL did legal research before publishing the Vorbis decoder for WinAmp, and Microsoft used Vorbis for various game titles (I'd guess they also did some legal research).

Of course, anyone can sue over anything, and keep you engaged in court for a long time, even without a good reason. MP3licensing (or MPEG-LA for the newer stuff) doesn't indemnify licensees, as can be seen every year when Sisvel lets German customs confiscate media players on Cebit over MP3 patents not part of the pool.

Note: not ragging on AAC, I think it's a very nice format, but it still is the primary iTunes media format and whilst many others do support it its got a lower level of support than mp3 across the board, but I can see how what I wrote might seem like I'm implying vendor lock in. For all the stick Apple gets about walled gardens they're surprisingly open on many other fronts.

Amazon not only uses DRM but it uses a non-standard ebook format and its hardware does not support vanilla ePub (out of the box, you can download third party viewers to the Fire devices

Amazon uses the MobiPocket format, which was the standard eBook format before ebooks became popular. The Topaz and Azul formats are only used for books which are converted by publishers to ebook by scanning them and OCR'ing the text. These formats appear to be based on the PDF format but the DRM mechanism is non-standard.

Amazon Kindle hardware does support ePub. The software does not. That is a major difference--if the hardware did nto support ePub, it would not be meaningfully possible to add support in via hardware.

Define "standard eBook format". Because, AFAIK, MobiPocket was never standardized. It may have been the popular eBook format, but that's not the same thing as standard.

I feel it's worth mentioning that the Amazon mp3 store was DRM free from the get-go, and long before Apple started providing DRM free music. In fact, it was probably on the example of Amazon that Apple was able to make such a demand ("look, the music industry hasn't imploded yet").

Also, while Apple does sell DRM-free files, access to their store requires iTunes - not exactly DRM, but a vendor tie-in that limits your access to the store and your purchased music. Contrast with Amazon, whereas you can buy/download tracks from your browser.

Amazon may have been DRM free because the music companies wanted to hedge on a competitor to test the waters. Just FYI.

> Amazon isn't making staggering amounts of money on the Kindle

Amazon sells more ebooks than print books (hard and soft back combined). I guess there's a lot of shovel-ware 99p dross in there, but still, it'd odd to say that Amazon is not making much money on Kindle.

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19148146)

I believe the point was that Amazon isn't making staggering amounts of money on the Kindle hardware itself (vs. Apple, where there was definitely money being made on the iPod hardware alone).

Yeah, should have been more clear on Kindle as hardware vs Kindle as ebook.

Based on the last quarter's filing Amazon isn't making any money at all, they are losing money.

That was due to a writedown due to bad acquisitions. The rest of their business made them heaps of money.

Apparently Apple doesn't require DRM in their iBook store either, it's up to the publisher:

http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/52245/are-all-ebook...

Apparently, neither does Amazon, it's up to the publisher:

From http://www.tierslivre.net/spip/spip.php?article2693 (a publisher against DRM): "avec ou sans DRM, ce n’est pas Amazon, c’est l’éditeur qui prescrit si oui ou non, comme il prescrit le prix" Which means It is not Amazon but the publisher that choses whether or not to put DRM, as it choses the price. Maybe it is a local policy however (as is the fixed price).

Nice find, hadn't come across that which I think helps reinforce the point I was making. Apple seems pretty chilled about avoiding content DRM in many areas.

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