Adobe Takes On Microsoft Role In E-book Market

ericatcw writes "Barnes & Noble, Sony and other e-book vendors may have the manufacturing muscle, but the brains directing the challenge against Amazon.com's Kindle eBook Reader is Adobe Systems. Like Microsoft, Adobe has built a formidable ecosystem of partners to whom it supplies software such as its encryption/DRM-creating Adobe Content Server. Adobe paints Amazon as being like Apple: secretive and playing badly with others. Amazon argues it just ain't so, and takes a jab, along with other critics, at Adobe's alleged open-ness."

Comments

Re:To be fair...

[PCM2]

Adobe just provides a platform; it's up to the producers to decide what protection (if any) to place on the documents.

Sort of true. But if you get in bed with Adobe because it has the best software for rendering professionally produced documents, then decide that you want some form of DRM for those documents, you're sort of stuck. Adobe might say "we have this method of doing DRM," and maybe it isn't exactly what you had in mind, but the reality is it's their way or the highway; you don't really get a vote. So you go along with it.