Are Mobipocket DRM's days numbered?

I wrote a column about this on TeleRead last week, and it's been on my
mind lately.

Amazon owns Mobipocket--a DRM format used by many other e-book stores.

Amazon has shown that they don't have any interest in sharing the
e-book field with their competitors--you can't read anyone else's
encrypted Mobi files on the Kindle without going through a lot of
Python-script rigamarole (or else just stripping the DRM). And they
have *apparently* not allowed Mobipocket to release a plain-vanilla
Mobi client for the iPhone (while they have themselves nonetheless
released an incompatible Kindle app for it).

So is it totally unreasonable to imagine that Amazon might, one day
soon, stop licensing Mobipocket DRM out? If they did, it could come as
quite an unpleasant shock to the stores like Books for a Buck or Books
On Board who use it. It could be like what happened when Overdrive
decided not to renew its contract with Fictionwise, and Fictionwise
had to scramble to replace the books its customers would lose--only in
this case every single DRM-encrypted Mobipocket book everywhere would
be affected. Perhaps seeing this coming, Fictionwise bought eReader
just so they would have an encryptable e-book format of their very own
to fall back on.

Here's the TeleRead column:

http://www.teleread.org/2009/03/04/drmd-mobipocket-is-the-e-text-on-the-wall/

-- 
Chris Meadows aka         | WWW: http://www.terrania.us   | Somebody help,
Robotech_Master           | ICQ: 5477383  AIM: RoboMastr  | I'm trapped in
[email protected] | Skype, Gizmo: Robotech_Master | a sig file!
[email protected]        | Yahoo: robotech_master_2000   |


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