Digital Rights Management (DRM) techniques are bad enough when applied to digital content, but this article notes that when there is not even a standard for DRM, the difficulties and problems that DRM creates are multiplied:

• E-books need a common language, By Troy Wolverton, San Jose Mercury News, (02/14/2010)

  I never need to worry about whether I can read a book. As long as a book's a book, that is — printed on paper, in English. I know I can pick it up and read it no matter how long it sits on my shelf after I bought it. But as we move into the era of e-books, that assumption no longer holds.

There is more on Apple's decision to impose DRM on ebooks, after dropping DRM from music, here:

• Digital handcuffs for Apple ebooks?, by Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times "Jacket Copy" blog. (February 16, 2010)

  Apple's old digital rights management software (DRM), FairPlay, is slated to make a comeback with the e-books it will be selling on its iBook Store. While music users have been free of these "digital handcuffs" for the last year, Alex Pham reports that readers will not be.

The Economic Report of the President is available from the White House web site in 3 formats: PDF, Kindle, and the open ePub format which Barnes & Noble's Nook, Sony's Reader, and other ebook-reader-software can use. The epub format, being an open, non-proprietary standard is, potentially, much easier to preserve for the long-term than proprietary formats like Kindle and PDF.

I looked at the Kindle version, the ePub version using the Stanza application on a Macintosh laptop and on an iPhone, and the PDF version on my laptop. The PDF looks the way the printed book looks with accurate page formatting and layout. The ePub and Kindle formatting is not perfect, but is readable. Table of Contents links did not work at all in Stanza, but did on the Kindle -- including links to individual statistical tables in the appendix. The PDF version has a navigation sidebar for the chapters, but not for the statistical tables within the appendix.

Statistical tables are complete and accurately formatted in the epub and Kindle versions. They are tiny on the iPhone, but re-sizable, so the tables are readable. I doubt many people will want to read those tables on their phones, however. On the Kindle, the statistical tables are not resizable and I found them very hard to read, even when I rotated them to "landscape" orientation. The tables did not appear at all in the Stanza app on the Macintosh.

This is a welcome first step for making digital government information more widely available. The digital publishing community needs to do more work on the open ePub format to handle formatting and links better and the hardware and software manufacturers need to work toward better usability. After working recently to produce a book in Kindle, epub, and PDF formats, I know that publishers (including whoever formatted these for ebook readers [GPO?]) can do a better job even now with what they have. But, this is a good first step.

See also: White House embraces e-book readers, By Nate Anderson, ars technica (February 15, 2010).

This is a presentation that is definitely worth seeing!

• Web of Books, Peter Brantley, Presentation at Tools of Change Frankfurt introducing the BookServer architecture. Brief description of history, motivations, and technical outline.

  "Creating a new architecture using common, open standards that permits people to ?nd, buy, acquire, and read books from any source, on any device, using many different ebook applications."

In The Chronicle of Higher Education, the university dean of William E. Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York reads Little Dorrit on four different devices and tells us what she learned from the experience.

• Reading Dickens Four Ways: How 'Little Dorrit' fares in multiple text formats, By ANN KIRSCHNER, Chronicle of Higher Education, Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 39, (June 12, 2009) Page B16 [subscription required]. Also available for a short time without a subscription.

I found her comments useful and interesting in general, not just for readers of novels. She has good insights into the utility and attractiveness of these different devices (if I may call a Penguin paperback a "device"!). She has her own preferences ("The iPhone is a Kindle killer"), but gives you enough information to help you draw your own conclusions.

Amidst all the hype and speculation and technological predictions about ebooks and multimedia, this is the first really useful article I have come across that gave me a good sense of the strengths and weaknesses of these tools. She even quotes some of her friends who repeat the hype and speculations that we hear so often.

This is the first thing I have read that makes me believe that someone may actually prefer reading a hearing on an iPhone!

Be prepared!

Of course, this is all from the user's perspective. She does not provide the perspective of the archivist, preservationist, or privacy-advocate. My wife (who adores taking her Kindle along when she travels) says everyone who stops her and asks to see it asks the same question: "Can I share Kindle books with others?" And her sad response is always, "No, Amazon does not allow you to share."