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Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
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Originally Posted by nategesner
Can someone explain in laymen's terms why books can't be stored as raw data? If publishers put out raw data, developers could build converters to force it to work with their particular program and with their particular features. This way we all have a common starting point. I was under the impression something similar existed with the old hyper-text of the early '90s. Is this really too hard?
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No, it's not. There's no reason publishers and readers couldn't use ASCII (for absolutely raw) or HTML text (for formatting) as e-book formats, and I understand the Sony reader can read HTML and PDF. They chose not to, in their attempt to create their own (hopefully) dominant format and TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD! (Did that white mouse say something?) Same reason no one's standardized DRM. |
Yeah, DRM is mostly it. Raw makes bigger files too, at least it should (DRM probably interferes with the compression that could otherwise be available). Somewhere around 90% of most dialog comes from a small vocabulary of around 50 words on average, meaning that without DRM ebooks should be extremely compressible - but I believe that compressibility is sacrificed at the expense of integrated DRM (somebody correct me if I'm wrong here).