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They may be a day late and a dollar short, but Adobe has finally responded to yesterday’s news that they were using the Digital Editions 4 app to spy on users.

Adobe hasn’t addressed all of the evidence against them, but they did admit that they were gathering info from users. They won’t admit to scraping my library, but they did admit to tracking a user’s activities. Adobe claims that it was covered by the their privacy policy and by the TOS for the app:

Adobe Digital Editions allows users to view and manage eBooks and other digital publications across their preferred reading devices—whether they purchase or borrow them. All information collected from the user is collected solely for purposes such as license validation and to facilitate the implementation of different licensing models by publishers. Additionally, this information is solely collected for the eBook currently being read by the user and not for any other eBook in the user’s library or read/available in any other reader. User privacy is very important to Adobe, and all data collection in Adobe Digital Editions is in line with the end user license agreement and the Adobe Privacy Policy.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t see how sending a user’s reading history in clear text over the web could possibly be in line with a privacy policy.

On a related note, I took some time today to read the TOS for Adobe Digital Edition 4, and I do not see where it gives them permission to track user behavior, much less upload said tracking data in the clear. What’s more, I have also heard from a couple other techies who also read the TOS and were unable to find mentions of this program.

Update: Robert has pointed out in the comments the relevant section of Adobe’s privacy policy, which you had to find on the Adobe website, and not the TOS I agreed to when I installed ADE 4.

I have asked Adobe for an explanation on this last issue, and I will update this post if they respond. Sadly, I don’t expect that to occur; Adobe has not responded to my emails on this issue (I got this statement second-hand from Rich Bellis of DBW).

Update: I am in discussion with Adobe on this and other issues.

It has been some 16 hours since I first broke the news that Adobe was spying on anyone who installed and ran Digital Editions 4, Adobe’s latest and greatest ebook app, and while I still do not have a response from Adobe I do have some new information to share.

I have followed up on this story and looked into the earlier versions of Digital Editions, just to see how long Adobe may have been spying on users. After testing DE2 and DE3 I can report, and others can confirm, that neither app appears to be tracking my reading habits nor uploading details about my ebook library.

The older apps do send some information to Adobe, but the data packet is small enough that it can’t hold much more than info required to authorize the DRM. So if you need one of Adobe’s apps, you do have safer options than DE4.

Adobe DE 3 can be downloaded from the Adobe website.

While the news about the older versions of Adobe DE is not enough to get me to use an Adobe app again, I thought this information could prove useful for librarians, teachers, and industry pros. Speaking of which, my story yesterday is taking on a life of its own and it turns out to have ramifications which I hadn’t considered.

This isn’t just a privacy violation any more; now there are concerns about how this breach would violate NDAs. According to Richard Pipe of Infogrid Pacific:

We have thousands of publisher books on our production workstations, many under non-disclosure agreements. Fortunately we have not yet rolled ADE4 out for testing (because it can’t handle inline images amongst other silly things).

This is a timely warning of corporate irresponsibility. We will ensure our publisher production contacts are all made aware of this. From a production facility perspective this is somewhat intimidating. If someone wants to ADE4 test a book under non-disclosure it will have to be on an isolated workstation modified as Michael mentioned. For us that will become a production services sales feature!

I didn’t directly discuss this need for security in my post yesterday, but it was at the back of my mind. It was safe to assume that someone’s corporate IT dept would run security tests on the new app before deploying it, so Adobe should have known that this privacy and security breach would have been caught and likely publicized.

In any case, if you are looking for an alternative to Adobe Digital Editions, the older versions still work. But if you wish to avoid Adobe entirely, as I plan to do, you could try competing apps like Bluefire Reader for Windows.

Independently developed by Bluefire, this app was released earlier this year. I’ve run it through the same check that revealed Adobe’s spying, and so far as I can tell it does not spy on you. (Adobe has made me so paranoid that I am still double checking this.)

Bluefire does offer the feature of syncing your reading position between the Windows app and Bluefire’s apps for Android and iOS, so you can expect them to send at least some info back to their servers, but that feature is optional and this app does not require that you log in.

To be fair to Adobe, all of the major ebook platforms offer the option of syncing your reading position, and that does require that information be uploaded to their servers. But one would also expect that the info is transmitted in a secure manner, and not left visible to all and sundry.

Speaking of syncing options, Adobe might have been tracking the reading position with plans to offer a sync option of their own. I am told they have an Adobe DE iPad app in the works, and I can see that syncing between the PC app and the iPad app would be a useful feature.

However, this still does not excuse the lack of security, nor does it excuse the fact that Adobe scanned my ebook library and uploaded the metadata.  That is beyond the pale.

image  by nolifebeforecoffee

Beating the third anniversary of Epub3 by about a month, Adobe released a new version of Adobe Digital Editions today.  Now publicly available for OSX and Windows, Adobe DE 4.0 is the first version of this app to officially support Epub3 – such as it is.

The new app supports many parts of the EPub3 spec, but according to the release notes there are still a few features which have been left out.

Update: Adobe goofed on the release notes. They now say that they forgot to remove from the release notes issues which had been resolved or fixed in this release.

For example, Adobe DE 4.0 does not support embedded audio or video, and it is also lacking support for basics like right to left languages (Arabic, Hebrew, etc) . The search function is incomplete, and the app is also lacking advanced rendering features (such as knockout, overprint, and non-separable blend modes). And last but not least, mouse wheel scrolling is officially not supported for Epub3 ebooks.

And it gets worse for Windows users. This version of the app is also lacking MathML support, and it does not play well with IE9. The Windows app will also ignore several lesser features, including wbr, which is used to indicate where to split a word when hyphenating.

In addition to the incomplete support for Epub3, several bugs have also been mentioned in release notes, including memory management issues caused by large image files and other issues.

While I would normally encourage readers to rush out and get the new app right away so you can play with it, I think it might be better to wait until more of the bugs are worked out and more features are supported. But if you would like to try Adobe DE 4 and experience the joy of Epub3 for yourself, you can download the app from Adobe.

News is coming out of Germany today that Random House has quietly stopped requiring Adobe DRM on the ebooks sold by German retailers.

Update: Alas, it has been confirmed as a technical error.

There’s been no formal announcement from Penguin Random House, but lesen.net is reporting that they have numerous confirmations in their user forums that the change has been made.

Readers are reporting that the hard encryption DRM from Adobe has been replaced by a soft DRM, namely digital watermarks. Popular Random House titles like  The Summer of blueberries and The Goldfinch are available as clean Epub files which can be downloaded, transferred, or converted with no hassle.

Digital watermarks are a type of DRM which does not lock down a file but instead adds extra bits of code which can be used to identify who bought the file, and where. This type of DRM is still uncommon in the US ebook market, but it is used widely in the "DRM-free" music sold by Amazon, Google, and Apple.

Digital watermarks are also growing increasingly popular among European publishers; as this infographic from Dutch ebook distributor CB Logistics shows, the majority of Dutch publishers have switched to this type of DRM. So have a number of other publishers in Europe.

At this time I cannot confirm the status of RH titles at Amazon.de, but I do know that at least one German ebook retailer, Libreka.de, is offering the ebooks with the new DRM.  Lesen.net is still waiting for confirmation from Random House about the new policy, so at this time it is not possible to rule out an error or technical snafu.

If this is a new policy then it will be the tipping point. The trade ebook market will have made a transition from hard DRM to soft DRM similar to the one which music went through in 2007 when Amazon was the first retailer to sell mp3 files from 4 of the major record labels sans DRM.

Amazon was allowed to sell "DRM-free" mp3 files because the market was then dominated by Apple and iTunes.  In a similar note, the German ebook retailer Libreka might have gained permission to change the DRM because Amazon dominates the trade ebook market.

I don’t know if that is why Random House made their decision, but I can add that the new DRM-policy is at best confined to Europe. I just bought a couple Penguin Random House titles from Amazon.com and B&N, and both were encrypted with DRM, darnit.

But in spite of the presence of Adobe DRM, I still think the change in Germany was a test and not a technical snafu; it matches too closely with the rumblings I have heard from other major US trade publishers.

As you know, Macmillan switched the SF publisher Tor-Forge Books to DRM-free in the summer of 2012. They have shown no visible interest in expanding that policy to the rest of the company, but I know of other US publishers who are considering similar policies.

Thanks to embargoes I cannot tell you much in the way of details, but I do know of two different US publishers considering radical shifts in their DRM policies. One could be announcing that change next week, but at this point I don’t have all of the details and cannot say for sure what will be announced.

You might want to go pop some more popcorn; the next month or so could be very interesting.

Yesterday Adobe and Google improved the reading experience of a quarter of the world’s population.

The two tech companies have cooperated in the development of Noto Sans, a free font family which is designed to provide a richer and more beautiful reading experience for Japanese, Chinese (both traditional and simplified), and Korean across both apps and OSes.

The Noto Sans font family, or Source Han Sans as Adobe is going to call it, includes over 65,000 glyphs in 7 weights (from light to bold). Its development drew on Adobe’s strong design and technical prowess in this area and proven in-country type design experience while Google provided in-country testing resources and expertise, and provided funding that made this project possible.

According to Google:

Noto Sans CJK is a sans serif typeface designed as an intermediate style between the modern and traditional. It is intended to be a multi-purpose digital font for user interface designs, digital content, reading on laptops, mobile devices, and electronic books. Noto Sans CJK is provided in seven weights: Thin, Light, DemiLight, Regular, Medium, Bold, and Black.

Fully supporting CJK requires tens of thousands of characters—these languages share the majority of ideographic characters, but there are also characters that are unique to only one language or to a subset of the languages. One of the primary design goals of Noto Sans CJK is that each script should retain its own distinctive look, which follows regional conventions, while remaining harmonious with the others.

The font family is available with a free subscription to Adobe, but it is probably easier to download it from the the Noto homepage, where you can get the font family in a single file or in a language specific file. You might want to bookmark this page; it’s where Google maintains the font families which they give away.

• Adobe
• Google

The Epub3 ebook format may have been finalized close to 3 years ago but it is still rather hard to use Epub3 ebooks on a PC.

There are any number of ebook apps which support some Epub3 features (including apps from the name-brand platforms like Kobo, Apple, etc) but those apps are mainly concentrated on iOS and Android.

At long last,that is about to change. Adobe and the IDPF announced yesterday that the new version of Adobe Digital Editions (and the Adobe RMSDK) were now available in a private beta.

Adobe DE 4.0 is the first version of Digital Editions to be based on the Readium Project, and thus it will be the first to also have support for much (but not all) of the Epub3 ebook format. While the current version of Adobe DE supports some features (vertical languages, for one), support for the Epub3 format is still incomplete.

According to the announcement, the Adobe DE 4.0 beta release supports both fixed layout (like cookbooks, graphic novels, textbooks) and reflowable content (novels), audio and video, MathML, Javascript, multiple rendition EPUBs,  and much more.

The beta test is private, so in order to get into it you will need to send an email to [email protected], ask nicely, and then fill out a long form. I’ve already signed up, but I have yet to test anything. At the time I wrote this post, the only beta app available was for OSX. I run Windows.

And that is annoying, because I was looking forward to running the new app through the test suite at EpubTest.org. That site launched earlier this year with the goal of tracking Epub3 support across all ebook apps and devices. That is the site that tells us that the latest version of iBooks (3.2) supports about 61% of Epub3 features while the Kobo app for the iPad supports 66%.

Curiously enough, the app which supports the most Epub3 features is not the official Readium app for Chrome but a white-label Dutch app. Bureau van Dijk Reader claims a score of 82%. If you are interested, it seems to be the work of this fellow.

P.S. On a related note, yesterday’s announcement also mentioned that the new version of the Adobe RMSDK would be released in beta. According to the IDPF, it “supports new Adobe Content Server (ACS) features including subscriptions and other advanced transaction and distribution models”.

In the US consumers are used to thinking of fixed book prices only in relation to the actual retail price, but in countries where fixed prices (resale price maintenance) are mandated by law there’s more to it than just the retail price.

For example, Germany’s book pricing laws prevent Amazon from offering free shipping on books sold there, and those same laws are why Apple cannot sell you a discounted iTunes gift card and let you buy ebooks.

And now it looks like the laws might also force publishers to go fully DRM-free. A bookseller based in southwest Germany is suing a publisher over its DRM policies, and the resulting ruling could affect ebook sales in many market.

Springer, one of the larger publishers in Germany and globally, sells ebooks both on its website and via 3rd-party retailers. The ebooks sold directly are only encumbered by digital watermarks, while the ebooks distributed through booksellers are locked down with Adobe DE DRM (and Kindle DRM). This puts the booksellers at a disadvantage, and naturally they’re not too pleased.

An ebook protected by a digital watermark can easily be transferred from one ebook reader to the next or converted from one format to another, but the same can’t be said for an ebook encrypted by Adobe DE DRM. Adobe’s DRM complicates a task as simple as transferring an ebook, and as for converting the ebook to another format? Don’t bother – not unless you want to first strip the DRM.

Osiander, a chain of 29 bookstores located in Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Bavaria, is suing Springer over DRM. While both Springer and Osiander are selling ebooks at the same price and under the same ISBN, the bookseller argues that thanks to the differences in DRM it is forced to sell an inferior product.

It is illegal under German law for a publisher to put one retailer at a disadvantage in favor of another. True, this legal principle has never been applied to DRM, but it is arguably valid and that is going to cause problems for Springer and other publishers.

If Osiander wins this lawsuit then Springer is going to have a problem on their hands. They’ll either have to start using Adobe DRM on their website or they will have to distribute ebooks without Adobe DRM (or Kindle DRM). Springer can still require digital watermarks and get a minimum of protection, but that won’t help everywhere.

Unfortunately for Springer, not all ebook platforms offer digital watermark DRM. The Kindle Store, for example, doesn’t offer this option to authors who use KDP (I don’t know if Amazon offers it to major publishers). I’m also not sure how many other ebook retailers and distributors support digital watermarks (aside from txtr and Centraal Boekhuis), but I suspect it is a minority.

Edit: Curiously enough, Osiander’s ebook distributor, Libreka, offers the option of digital watermarks (source). This raises the question of whether Springer is either unwilling or unable o use this option.

Update: It’s been explained to me that Springer has already complied with this request. Nevertheless,  Osiander is still pushing the issue with the goal of getting it officially decided as to whether publishers can offer different levels of DRM in different ebookstores.They’ve filed a complaint with regulators.

As a result, Springer is between a rock and a hard place (and so are the other publishers who have chosen to adopt friendlier forms of DRM). They can either choose to be nice to readers, and have to go DRM-free in the Kindle Store, or they can adopt a stricter DRM policy.

Needless to say, no one likes that second option but I can see why publishers might choose it. Most publishers who opt for digital watermarks want at least a limited form of DRM, so I doubt that they would be willing to forgo DRM entirely.

On the other hand, this lawsuit could result in publishers pressuring ebook distributors to add support for digital watermark DRM. And that would be a win all around, I think.

BuchReport.de, lesen.net

image by marc kjerland

Adobe has provided a graphic demonstration of the problems with relying on cloud services for core functions.

Starting late Wednesday night, and continuing well into Thursday, Adobe suffered from an unexpected server outage. Many users of the cloud-based FormsCentral, Photoshop Illustrator, TypeKit, and other Adobe tools were unable to log in and get work done. (This, in spite of previous claims by Adobe that users would be able to access the services for up to 3 months while offline.)

From some user reports, this outage also affected installed desktop apps such as InDesign and Photoshop: "Several [Creative Cloud installations] in our office have been down for over 10 hours here," user @Rikki_B told MacUser via Twitter on Thursday morning. "Seems to be no way to access [apps], trying to open them results in the login screen, can’t see a way around it."

The exact cause of the outage has not been explained by Adobe but it was belatedly confirmed, and after the issue was resolved Adobe indicated that the failure happened "during database maintenance activity".

Adobe had launched the new suite of Creative Cloud-only apps and services last May, including Photoshop CC, InDesign CC, Illustrator CC, Dreamweaver CC, and other apps. The new online apps were replacements for Creative Suite 6, making them effectively Creative Suite 7.

As of February Adobe had an estimated 1.8 million paid Creative Cloud subscriptions. At an annual cost starting at $600 to $840, users get free updates, services like online backup and file-sharing, and the shared joy of knowing that a couple million people are sharing your pain.

iPad owners have long been able to create everything from ebooks to powerpoint presentations on their tablet, and earlier today Adobe added a new app to the toolbox.

Adobe Voice is a free multimedia iPad app that makes it easy for users to create short animated videos by using a combination of their own recorded voice, imagery, music and cinema-quality motion graphics and effects.

This simple app automates much of the process, including smoothing the graphics, sweetening the audio, and uploading the video so it can be viewed online.

"Adobe Voice puts the power of Creative Cloud’s industry-leading video and audio technology into the hands of the masses," said Winston Hendrickson, Adobe’s VP of Products for Creative Media Solutions.

A user can use entirely their own content to create a story, but the app also includes a bevy of useful music and images which can be incorporated into whatever you like. In addition to a library of over 25,000 professionally designed icons, the app also has 30 stock themes to use as a starting point, 30 music tracks to play in the background, and example videos and starter ideas to inspire new works.

You can find the app in iTunes.

Good news! Adobe announced late this afternoon that they won’t be breaking a lot of ebook readers in July.

According to the Datalogics blog, Adobe has decided to revise the adoption timeline for their new DRM, and they will no longer be requiring all ebook retailers, app developers, and device makers to upgrade their DRM support by July 2014:

After receiving feedback from customers and webinar attendees, Adobe has revised the migration timetable for customers.  “Adobe does not plan to stop support for ACS 4 or RMSDK 9.  ACS 5 books will be delivered to the older RMSDK 9 based readers”, according to Shameer Ayyappan, Senior Product Manager at Adobe.  “We will let our resellers and publishers decide when they wish to set the DRM flag on ACS 5, thus enforcing the need for RMSDK 10 based readers.”

If you’re just tuning in, news broke yesterday that Adobe was going to require ebook retailers and developers to upgrade to the recently release Adobe Content Server 5 by July 2014. ACS 5 supports a new type of DRM which is not compatible with existing ebook apps and ereaders, thus forcing everyone to upgrade or replace their hardware, or they will lose access to their legally purchased content.

This would have hurt readers, indie ebook retailers, and probably helped Amazon, Google, and Kobo. Yesterday I was the first to report about the many problems this would cause, both to me and to other readers, so I am especially pleased that Adobe changed their mind.

Update: Adobe has backed down.

When Adobe announced their new DRM a couple weeks ago some said that we would soon see compatibility issues with older devices and apps as Adobe forced everyone to upgrade.

At that time I didn’t think Adobe would make the mistake of cutting off so many existing readers, but now it seems that I could not have been more wrong on the issue.

The following video (found via The SF Reader) confirms that Adobe is planning to require that everyone (ebookstores, app and device makers) to upgrade to the new DRM by July 2014.

http://youtu.be/9qb-sXVlK_o?t=24m47s

The video is a recording of a webinar hosted by Datalogics and Adobe, and it covers in detail aspects of how and when the new DRM will be implemented (as well as a lot of other data). If the embed link doesn’t work for you, here’s a link to the video on Youtube.

The tl;dr version is that Adobe is going to start pushing for ebook vendors to provide support for the new DRM in March, and when July rolls Adobe is going to force the ebook vendors to stop supporting the older DRM. (Hadrien Gardeur, Paul Durrant, and Martyn Daniels concur on this interpretation.)

Update: Adobe has backed down and removed the July deadline.

This means that any app or device which still uses the older Adobe DRM will be cut off. Luckily for many users, that penalty probably will not affect readers who use Kobo or Google reading apps or devices; to the best of my knowledge neither uses the Adobe DRM internally. And of course Kindle and Apple customers won’t even notice, thanks to those companies' wise decision to use their own DRM.

But everyone else just got screwed.

If you’re using Adobe DE 2.1, come July you won’t be able to read any newly downloaded DRMed ebooks until after you upgrade to Adobe DE 3.0. If you’re using a preferred 3rd-party reading app, you won’t be able to download any new DRMed ebooks until after the app developer releases an update.

And if you’re using an existing ebook reader, you’d better plan on only reading DRM-free ebooks until further notice.

One thing Adobe seems to have missed is that there are tens of millions of ebook readers on the market that support the older DRM but will probably never be upgraded to the new DRM. Sony and Pocketbook, for example, have released a number of models over the past 5 or so years, most of which have since been discontinued.

Do you really think they’re going to invest in updating a discontinued (but otherwise perfectly functional) device?

I don’t, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Not only will millions of existing readers be cut off, there are also hundreds of thousands of ebook readers sitting on store shelves which, as of July, will no longer support Adobe DRM.

And do you know what’s even better? All signs point to the ebook reader market having peaked in 2011 or 2012 (I have industry sources which have said this) so the existing and soon to be incompatible ereaders will probably outnumber the compatible models for the indefinite future (years if not decades).

If you look hard enough you can still buy many of the ebook readers released in 2010, 2011, and 2012 as new, and you can also find them as refurbs or used. They work just fine today (albeit a little slowly by today’s standards) but when July rolls around they will be little more than junk.

And that includes ebook readers owned by libraries and other cost conscious institutions.

If you’re beginning to grasp just how bad this move could be, wait a second because I’m not done.

Not only will readers be affected, but so will indie ebookstores. They’re going to have to pay to upgrade their servers and their reading apps. That cost is going to hit them in the pocketbook (potentially driving some out of business), and that’s not all.

Many if not most of the indie ebookstores are dependent on the various Adobe DRM compatible ebook readers on the market. They cannot afford to develop their own hardware so they rely on readers buying and using devices made by other companies including, Pocketbook, Sony, Gajah (a major OEM), and others.

Once those existing ebook readers are abandoned by Adobe the indie ebookstores will probably lose customers to one or another of the major ebook vendors.

In other words Adobe just gave Amazon a belated Christmas present. After all, everyone might hate Amazon but we also know we can trust them to not break their DRM.

Folks, the above scenario spells out all the reasons why I didn’t expect Adobe to completely abandon support for the older DRM. It is so obviously a bad idea that I thought they would avoid it.

With that in mind, I would also like to add an addendum and apply Tyrion’s Razor. Perhaps Adobe has internal data which says that this won’t be a serious issue.  I seriously doubt it, but it’s possible.

P.S. But if this turns out to be the utter disaster I am expecting, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Adobe for on yet another occasion giving DRM a bad name.

When Adobe debuted their new Epub DRM last week some predicted that the new DRM would soon cause compatibility problems, and it looks like that prediction came true sooner than I would have liked.

There are several reports on Twitter this morning that a bug in the latest version of Adobe DE is wreaking havoc, with several users reporting that they have ebooks which could be downloaded to Adobe DE but not transferred over to an ebook reader (like the Nook, Aura, or PRS-T3):

If you install current ADE3, some books you download to it may not be able to be transferred or downloaded to mobile devices.

— Micah (@micahsb) January 25, 2014

This has also been confirmed by a couple other users (one, two). According to Micah Bowers, CEO of Bluefire Reader, the bug is only affecting a small fraction of newly downloaded ebooks and it is blocking users from transferring their purchased ebooks to their ebook readers. That’s not what one user reported on Twitter:

I had a bunch of books on my laptop & yesterday ADE wouldn’t let me access them. I purchased them 7 years ago. So NOT happy.

— Rebecca (@RebeLovesBooks) January 27, 2014

It’s not completely clear whether the new DRM is specifically to blame and not simply the fact that major new app releases are sometimes buggier than one would like, but Adobe has been apprised of the issue and I am sure they are working on a fix.  But until they release an update you probably should not install Adobe DE 3.0.

What we have here is an example of why you should never install new apps until after someone else has had a chance to be a guinea pig. Adobe DE 3.0 included a few minor improvements, but its chief noteworthy feature was the new and supposedly uncrackable DRM, and until I knew for sure that it wasn’t going to bite me in the ass I wasn’t going to install the update.

TBH, I wasn’t going to install the update until I knew for sure that the DRM had been cracked, thus enabling me to protect my purchases. I’m told that has not yet been accomplished, but I would bet that someone is working on it.

Rumors have been circulating since at least October 2013 that Adobe was planning to release a new version of their DRM for Epub ebooks, and it looks like the rumors have come true. Adobe has released a new version of Adobe Digital Editions yesterday, and guess what?

The features page says that along with improved CSS support and better support for vertical languages (Japanese, for example), Adobe DE 3.0 also includes a new DRM which is described as now being "hardened and made more secure".

Yes, after over 2 years 4 years of quietly ignoring the fact that their DRM was hacked, Adobe finally took a step to repair the broken lock. And as part of their effort Adobe also updated Adobe Content Server 5 (there’s also a new RMSDK), thus enabling ebookstores to provide ebooks that use the new DRM and allowing app and device developers to integrate the new DRM.

Some are panicking over the news that there is new DRM, with my competition suggesting that this will drive readers into the arms of Amazon,  but I have decided to take a more realistic approach.

Yes, there’s a new type of DRM out there, and yes we will eventually see ebook readers and apps that support it. But for the near future the devices and apps that do not support the new DRM (and frankly, never will support the new DRM) will far out number the newer gadgetry that does. And that means that the vast body of existing ereaders and apps is going to drive the market. eBookstores will want to sell to the largest number of potential customers, so they will continue to offer the older DRM.

They already know that they’re losing customers to Amazon, Apple, and B&N, all of which have a proprietary DRM schema, so they’ll do their best to avoid losing what few customers they can get.

I can’t see an ebookstore putting up a warning message that the ebooks they sell can only be read on newer ereaders and apps, can you?

No, I think it much more likely that we will see almost no adoption of the new DRM. Instead I expect to see a repeat of the launch of the Nook store in 2009, when B&N announced their clever new DRM which no one else adopted.

Just about the only ones who will adopt the DRM will be the hackers who have probably already started working on cracking the DRM. I would put good money that the DRM will be hacked long before any reader encounters it.

Would anyone care to take that bet?

lesen.net

image by m thierry

Remember earlier this month when Adobe revealed that someone had hacked the software giant’s servers and stolen info on 2.9 million customers? It turns out the leak was significantly larger – by over an order of magnitude, in fact.

Brian Krebs of Krebs on Security is now saying that the leak has impacted at least 38 million users, a group 13 times as large as previously announced. And that’s not all.

Besides the hacked accounts, Krebs' sources at Adobe are saying that the hackers made off with some or all of the source code for Photoshop. This is in addition to the massive (over 40GB) amount of source code already uncovered, including source code for  Acrobat, Cold Fusion, Adobe’s web app platform, and Reader.

Yes, someone made off with a copy of the source code for a PDF reading app that has grown uglier and less useful with each release. If we are lucky the hackers might be planning to release a new and improved version of the app.

Over the weekend AnonNews.org posted a 3.8 GB file online that Krebs says looks identical to the stash of stolen Adobe info he stumbled upon earlier this month. It contains more than 150 million username and hashed password pairs, raising serious questions just how many accounts were compromised.

Adobe has been contacting all the customers that might have been affected with a warning and a request that passwords be changed. Pretty much everyone who has bought an ebook with Adobe DE DRM got that email, including me.

They have also offered a free year of credit monitoring for any customer whose credit card info may have been stolen. Of course, this offer is only good via Experian, which has its own history of selling consumer info to an online identity theft service.

The latest word from Adobe is that there was no sign that there has been any unauthorized activity on any Adobe ID involved in the incident. “So far, our investigation has confirmed that the attackers obtained access to Adobe IDs and (what were at the time valid), encrypted passwords for approximately 38 million active users,” Adobe spokesperson Heather Edell said. “We have completed email notification of these users. We also have reset the passwords for all Adobe IDs with valid, encrypted passwords that we believe were involved in the incident—regardless of whether those users are active or not.”

The investigation is continuing, so the number of affected users could still grow.