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MP3 and online music brought DRM to public awareness, but the online distribution of materials previously published on paper - from books to newspapers to business documents - is what really has the industry talking. Every major DRM solutions provider is directing substantial resources toward the publishing sector, which has billions of pages of content to move online.
Many in the industry are waiting to see whether eBooks fulfill their promise as a preferred reading medium in the new millennium. Displaying the contents of traditional books on the screen of a desktop computer or handheld reading device, eBooks offer many unique advantages. Students, lawyers, doctors, and technical personnel are just a few of the readers who could enjoy the compact size, searchability, and portability of these digitized documents. Market acceptance of eBooks depends on several factors, including the development of format standards and real-world DRM tools for online publishers. "Traditional publishers, with understandable reluctance to lose control of their existing intellectual property, have been resistant to allow their works to be digitized," says Peter Perine, publishing-segment general manager at Xerox, in a recent InfoWorld interview. Some companies, such as Glassbook, believe that Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), with its visual fidelity, searchability, and broad user base, is the ideal eBook format. And the Open eBook Authoring Group - of which Adobe is a voting member - has gone a long way toward establishing an "MP3 for eBooks." Xerox, for one, is integrating Adobe PDF into its ContentGuard rights management solution. Under this joint Adobe-Xerox initiative, publishers will be able to use Adobe PDF for content distribution, while benefiting from the turnkey protection, eCommerce, and rights-clearing capabilities of ContentGuard. Consumers will be able to access the content using the familiar (and free) Adobe Reader. "Combining the rights management capabilities of ContentGuard with the format and cross-platform functionality of Adobe PDF allows us to bring document eCommerce capabilities to a broader audience than ever before," says Ranjit Singh, senior vice president and general manager of Xerox Internet & Software Solutions. Adobe and Xerox are also jointly supporting the definition of an open standard for DRM, an area being addressed by the EBX Working Group. And when it comes to DRM tools, Adobe is one of the first companies out of the gate with Adobe PDF Merchant and Web Buy. "Adobe PDF Merchant allows us to use the content we already have, provide broad consumer accessibility, and protect the integrity of documents distributed across the Internet," says Ken Brooks, vice president of electronic publishing at Barnes & Noble.
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