DRM News

The Electronic Frontier Foundation put out an e-book buyer’s guide to privacy, which takes a look at 5 different readers and lets you know if they collect information about what you are reading, what you are searching for, etc.

Their full article can be found here.

The only ‘privacy’ question I don’t see a need to be there is, ‘Can they keep track of book purchases?’. I would think this would be a good thing in case your e-reader dies and goes to electronics heaven and you need to redownload your books. Keeping track of purchases is a pretty minor thing to worry about considering some of the other issues that are pointed out.

(update) Amazon ups its ante by increasing its royalty rate for Authors and Publishers. (source) There are a few restrictions though. The books must be price the same or below what other ebooks are selling for in other ebook stores, it must be 20% less than a physical copy, has to include all the features of Kindle, and only books sold in the US will be eligible.

This is good for Authors and Publishers, and maybe it will entice more authors to the Kindle. As it stands now a few of my favourite authors are on different formats, and buying multiple readers sort of defeats the purpose of an ebook. My hope is that there will be a standardized ebook file format and that ebook readers compete on the merits of the electronics, not on who has books with whom.