Opening the door to OA ebooks

Peter Brantley, PDFs, eBooks, and DRM, Shimenawa, October 19, 2005. Excerpt:

A long long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (New York), I made the suggestion in an Open eBook Forum that if publishers were to adopt DRM for eBooks, then libraries should be able to receive a copy of the work with the DRM either disabled or removed. This copy could then be placed in an archive against the risk that in the future, electronic-only books might be irrevocably lost. Even more than with object formats or MIME types, DRM is of-the-day. Within CDL's own monograph-based text delivery system, our eScholarship Editions repository, I've long hoped that eventually we would be permitted by the UC Press to make available portable PDF- or Palm Reader-formatted versions of open-access texts. With Adobe's participation in the Open Content Alliance, this thought surfaces again, but perhaps in a more user- oriented way. Given that (for now) all of the works being contributed for ingest into the OCA system are out-of-copyright, there are no legal barriers to multiple format derivations. Common sense permits the observation that out-of-copyright texts are not likely to be heavily accessed reference materials, but fiction, early science (largely useless for all but sociology or history of science), and older historical narratives. These works might actually be read, but they won't be if they are locked into page-turned web-based UIs....Uniquely, though, this corpus of curated material might be attractive to a large-ish and diverse group of users, and therefore...might be a rare strategic opportunity to help advance the desirability of device-independent texts. I wonder: if Adobe is truly committed to being more than an underlying technology provider to the OCA; if they truly support the concept that the content is open; and given that the content will be available in PDF: would they bless an open ebook pdf format, and leave it devoid of the DRM that Acrobat products currently incorporate? Wouldn't that ultimately facilitate adoption of portable texts by the larger market, and therefore benefit everyone? I think so.